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Once upon a time, I watched a new paramedic (also a new employee) take the mattress off our stretcher (with linen still covering it), disinfect the stretcher frame, and put the mattress back on.  As a smartass, my way of dealing with this was to ask, “Hey, are you going to disinfect the part of the stretcher that the patient actually sits on?”  I said it with a smile–a bit of ribbing not meant to be nasty.

He became indignant, sputtered several times while stripping sheets off the mattress, and finally came up with:  “Dude, I’ll show you how clean this mattress is.”  Whereupon he licked the mattress.  I was actually shocked speechless, and to this day that’s probably the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in medicine.  My impression of this goofball as a paramedic never recovered, either.

Which brings us to a study entitled “Bacterial Pathogens in Ambulances:  results of unannounced sample collection.”  This isn’t the first study to swab ambulances to see what grew, but I enjoyed the title’s specific warning:  We didn’t give the crews a chance to clean up.  This is also reflected in their hypothesis:  “that a discrepancy exists between the expectation of disinfection [in EMS]…and the cleaning that actually occurs.”  They found one really clean ambulance out of four, with a final count of 7 varieties of bacteria, 4 of them pathogens, 3 of which had some level of antibiotic resistance.  If you really want the full results, they’re available by clicking on the thumbnail at left.

I’ve been keenly aware of both ambulance germs and hospital disinfection policies lately, and since I still run an ambulance shift now and then, I’ve begun cleaning my stretcher with disinfectant wipes after every call.  It turns out that I might have to be more careful with even those:  a Welsh study suggests that those wipes (which are really convenient, aren’t they?) might be really good at cleaning one surface, but tend to just spread the bacteria from place to place.

(sigh)  Sometimes even trying to do the right thing isn’t enough.  Sucks, doesn’t it?