Dr. Schmidt explains the world: Why are hospital germs dangerous?

Steffen, two questions to start with: What are hospital germs? And what consequences can they have?

“Hospital germ” is a typical media word. As a rule, this means a bacterium. A hospital with many patients in a small space is an ideal area for the evolution of modified bacterial strains. What’s particularly bad is that they can become resistant to common antibiotics. And then they meet people with weakened immune systems, where bacteria and viruses can take hold relatively easily. This can have serious consequences: sepsis, for example. The infection causes the immune system to “go crazy,” so to speak. So strong that you can die from it.

Can these bacteria also harm healthy people, such as hospital visitors?

If your immune system is intact, it can probably handle the bacteria. The “multi-resistant germs” are particularly threatening to patients themselves.

What role does the use of antibiotics play?

A big. Before treating an infection, it should actually be checked whether it is a bacterial infection and whether it therefore makes sense to use an antibiotic. Inflationary use causes resistance, which is now a major problem. This has made the treatment of “hospital germs” more difficult.

What can you do in the current situation? Clean more in hospitals?

Hygiene is undoubtedly important. But health in Germany is a business with tough profit interests. Cleaning work is often outsourced to external companies. This means that a hospital has little control over whether certain hygiene requirements are being implemented.

This is also the case in other institutions, for example in schools.

If you mean the problems with school toilets, they probably didn’t just arise with outsourcing – at least not in the big cities. I can remember that even in the GDR, Berlin school toilets were occasionally, let’s say, “special.” And the GDR had no commercialized education and health system.

We use antibiotics not only in medicine, but also in animal fattening. And we then ingest them through food. So does the body get used to the antibiotics?

I have doubts as to whether this argument is watertight. Traces of antibiotics are sometimes detected in pork, veal and poultry. But whether this triggers resistance in pathogens in humans is controversial. If it were that easy, the Dutch would have as big a problem as we do. The country is densely populated and there is intensive livestock farming with huge fattening stables. Nevertheless, our neighbors have fewer multi-resistant bacteria in their hospitals. But they also test for problematic pathogens when patients are admitted and treat them immediately.

What alternative to antibiotics is there?

There were considerations of using certain viruses against bacteria, so-called bacteriophages. The French doctor Félix d’Hérelle came up with the idea between the two world wars, but found little support in the West at the time. At the beginning of the 1930s, at Stalin’s invitation, he came to Tbilisi, where he founded an institute for phage therapy together with his Georgian friend Georgi Eliava. Eliava fell victim to Stalin’s “purges” in 1937, but his institute’s research work is now also attracting interest in the West.