Now, like all pieces of medical equipment, it would probably good to culture some swabs off them to see what's growing, and how hard they are to clean.
Tabloid scare-stories of "X species of bacteria found living on Y" just feed on the public's ignorance of microbiology; i.e. "wow that many on the average toothbrush!"... well, how many are found in your mouth? In the intestines? How do we define a bacterial species?
A doctor has been seeing patients all day, and visits one with an active C. difficile infection. They touch the patient's bed (which has been shown to be as contaminated with organism as the skin), and then, before they change their gloves, adjust their glasses - transferring the pathogen to a surface it can likely persist on for some span of time.
Later that day, they adjust their glasses again (seriously, I do this like 20 times a day), and recontaminate their hands before examining another patient.
Glasses - along with shoes, ties, lab coats, cell phones, etc. represent potential sources of cross contamination between patients, and are an active area of scientific and medical research.
Doctor visits patient with <highly transmissable pathogen> touches x, washes hands and but then (!) retouches x and treats an immune-deficient patient etc. My point is x can be forehead, hair, pocket, watch, any variable you can think of and we can't control for any of them.
You seem to think every item a doctor carries needs to be autoclaved at clocking out time, when really the only viable solution is to wash your hands, change gloves etc. — sterilise your contact points, not your person and everything on it.
Yes, we can. Infection control procedure is exactly that, and we have begin looking at how we can minimize as many of those items as possible. Things like the universal gowning and gloving studies, examining how to clean surfaces and keep them clean, what to do about cell phone and clothing contamination, etc.
There are a massive number of studies showing contamination of things doctors carry, and studies showing heavy correlations between the level of contamination and patient outcomes. It's an active area of research, and commercial development.
Your idea that somehow "Wash your hands and change gloves" is fine, but "Find out if you can use clorhexidine wipes on Google Glass, and if we need to" is somehow Infection Control Gone Mad! really puzzles me.
Perhaps it isn't well characterized to begin with?
Um...trying to figure out what to do about smartphones and the contaminants they carry is a very active area of discussion in infection control right now.
I do believe this is a solvable problem (as do the people working on it, I'd imagine), but it hasn't been solved yet.
Perhaps a sealant on the device plus a cleaning regimen will do the trick, but right now I'd put google glass somewhere near neckties (glad that that's been largely dealt with), lab coats and, well, pretty much anything that has places that will readily harbor foreign bacteria as a terrible thing to wear from room to room in a hospital.
So I guess that given the state of things right now (riddled with such harbors), it's perfectly reasonable to give the technical benefits of glass a try. Maybe we'll come up with some good software that will save some lives.
(This may seem like a retraction, but I was really just comparing Google Glass vs regular glasses in my original reply).
[Edit] this was intended as a reply to the person the parent was quoting.
Additionally, if they're being used heavily by people not used to wearing glasses, the frequency of touching them is probably higher.
Umm...depends on how hard it is to clean. Something we don't know the answer to. I can hose down my glasses with clorhexidine, they're entirely inert. Can I do that with a Google Glass? Does interacting with your glasses as an information gathering tool change usage patterns - for better or ill?
You can't say there's no change worth talking about until you actually do the study. Not even a particularly hard study at that.
> Look, I get the idea of "Hey, here's something new, it could change something in a bad way, so lets test it." Fine, I hope someone does that. But the fact that these kind of concerns are the first thing that come to people's mind and make it to the top of this thread means the discussion is bad. Every time someone mentions something revolutionary like a self-driving car, we could spend the discussion talking about that super unusual situation when the self-driving car is more dangerous than a normal one. Or when Amazon starts drone deliveries would could imagine that one time it crash and kills a dog. But this is just a distraction.
First off, I was like the first or second poster on the thread - that it got a lot of comments is possibly just because it was there.
Second, I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist with a particular interest in hospital infection control, especially surface contamination mediated transmission. Asking questions like this is my job.
We don't know whether the new curved cell phone screens will harbor more bacteria either. And we don't know if increased close-range tablet usage by doctors will subtlety make them want to focus less closely on patient sores. And of course we can make strong physics argument about why wifi is non-ionizing and so doesn't cause DNA damage....but couldn't the extra heat in the room increase bacterial growth?
> Second, I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist with a particular interest in hospital infection control, especially surface contamination mediated transmission. Asking questions like this is my job.
This isn't a personal attack, I'm explaining why I don't think this is particularly valuable to the thread.
Look, I get the idea of "Hey, here's something new, it could change something in a bad way, so lets test it." Fine, I hope someone does that. But the fact that these kind of concerns are the first thing that come to people's mind and make it to the top of this thread means the discussion is bad. Every time someone mentions something revolutionary like a self-driving car, we could spend the discussion talking about that super unusual situation when the self-driving car is more dangerous than a normal one. Or when Amazon starts drone deliveries would could imagine that one time it crash and kills a dog. But this is just a distraction.
Its just about simple bacteria spread - would you want your immunocompromised relative in contact with a doctor that has just been in contact with a contagious infection source without at least trying to minimise the chance of cross infection?
The stethoscope is a similar concern - rarely cleaned properly, often present.
This probably is the same problem for regular glasses, so it's not a new concern unless the Google Glass gets touched more often.
We do talk about sterilizing equipment doctors carry - lab coats, ties, stethoscopes, phones, etc. all the time. There's just not a good solution yet, which is one of the reasons one might need to assess:
1. How much of a problem this is for Google Glass in particular?
2. How amenable are the devices to cleaning?
You know, exactly what I said in my first post.
It looks like you have a background in epidemiology, so not sure if you are seriously concerned or posting for the pure perfection of deploying your nick. But it is an interesting question and assumedly one they thought through.
The alternative inputs they mentioned (head tilts) may have been designed to minimize needing to touch Glass. Certainly touching glass after having ones hands on some patients would be a concern -- and for the health provider given that it's rather close to the eyes.
Providers do touch smartphones, tablets, pens, etc. when they are with patients. I wonder whether Glass can be chem wiped. Many of the chemicals used in the wipes are reportedly weak carcinogens as well (at least where I trained), so personally I would be concerned about putting something on my face that had been wiped repeatedly during a 16 hour shift.
However, if it's not touched, then it's no worse than eyeglasses and likely to be less of a fomite than a white coat or a necktie.[1]
[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB125859205137154753?mg=... (Plenty of peer reviewed studies, but this is publicly accessible.)
It was a perfect use of my nick, but more importantly I'm a computational epidemiologist who works on hospital acquired infections. It's mostly a curiosity, to see if the gesture and command based Glass system results in less carriage than some other tools. It likely cuts down on some things, but I touch my own glasses all the damned time to adjust them, and I'm used to them - I've been wearing them all my life.
Also, hospitals already sterilize surgical instruments, but I did a quick search and it looks like some manufacturers are designing devices meant to be deployed in nursing stations in response to mobile.[1] So maybe more use of these devices will actually drive increased use of rapid sanitizers within the clinic, as a secondary benefit.
http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/news/2013/09/steridesig...
Not really, no.