bioMérieux's WorkSafe™ Initiative gains momentum in an effort to drive blood culture contamination rates to zero

bioMérieux, Inc., a leading in vitro diagnostics company, with a strong focus on infectious diseases, continues to develop solutions that promote lab safety, efficiency and minimize healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that annual HAIs in the U.S. exceed two million occurrences, resulting in 90,000 deaths per year and over $4.5 billion in healthcare costs. As a result, infection control has become a significant component of patient safety and rapid diagnosis critical in reducing the risk of infection.

New England Journal of Medicine studies show that blood stream infections are among the highest-cost infections and the most rapidly increasing in frequency. Blood culture collection is the first step in determining infection and contamination must be controlled to improve the efficiency of that first step.

bioMérieux's WorkSafe™ Initiative was developed to support laboratory product training, safety education and promote best practices in all stages of blood culture, from collection to care. The campaign educates laboratorians about lab safety, blood collection, and the use of plastics-- , as opposed to glass.

Since the WorkSafe Initiative's inception in May 2007, bioMérieux has developed an educational resource kit for laboratory professionals, which contains, a training video on proper blood culture collection techniques, competency checklist and certification, plastic bottles, safety collection adapters and skin preparation.

The use of proper equipment and correct technique can reduce blood culture contamination rates. In July, the WorkSafe™ Blood Culture Kit was launched, eliminating the need for nurses or phlebotomists to manually pull loose and disparate materials used for blood culture collection together to help minimize blood collection contamination and the risk of false positives.

The WorkSafe Blood Culture Kit is a key element of bioMérieux's WorkSafe initiative, equipping hospital workers with one simple kit that includes all the necessary components for safe and efficient blood collection.

Each blood culture collection kit includes BacT/ALERT® 3D blood culture bottles (2), Smiths Medical Saf-T adapters (2), alcohol prep pads (2), PDI Chlorhexidine Gluconate Swab, latexfree tourniquet, wall chart instruction sheet, biohazard disposal bag, The WorkSafe Blood Collection kit is designed to introduce, best practices and efficiency in the blood collection process. The goal is to effectively lower the incidence of contamination for blood cultures.

As an industry leader, bioMérieux will continue to develop educational materials, as part of the WorkSafe Initiative, to empower healthcare professionals and encourage best practices, maximize lab performance and empower clinical decision-making. Please visit www.biomerieux-usa/worksafe to play a part in reducing contaminations rates.

DiversiLab™ System offers same-day strain typing for real-time epidemiological investigations

Last year's acquisition of Bacterial Barcodes, Inc. (BBCI), gave bioMérieux the opportunity to incorporate the DiversiLab™ System into their expanding offering of molecular diagnostic products. Used for DNA fingerprinting and analysis, the DiversiLab System is a powerful tool used for tracking the source and spread of Healthcare-Associated Infections. The rapid results provide infection control practitioners same-day strain typing for real-time epidemiological investigations.

Studies show that there are up to 2,000,000 Healthcare- Associated Infections per year which are responsible for up to 90,000 deaths annually in the US. Both state and federal governments are focused on increasing patient safety through the reduction of HAI's. Mandatory reporting and the ultimate denial of payment for HAI's by Medicare have prompted hospitals to reexamine their infection control practices.

Infection control has a variety of methods to help control the spread of infection within their institution. Hand Hygiene, Barrier Precautions and Patient Isolation are methods used to prevent the transmission of HAIs, whereas Active Surveillance and Strain Typing are used to detect colonization or pinpoint organisms involved in outbreak situations.

Prior to now, Infectious Disease Physicians and Infection Control Practitioners have been unable to take advantage of strain typing due to the lack of reproducibility and very long turn around times. Traditional Pulsed Field Gel Electrophoresis (PFGE) performed in-house takes from three to five days, while send out PFGE takes two to three weeks. The results are not actionable and are usually unable to affect patient care, due to the long turn around time, and are usually not ordered due to this reasoning.

The DiversiLab™ System is the only system on the market that provides same day strain typing for real-time epidemiological investigations. The highly reproducible fingerprint patterns can be stored to facilitate historical tracking to help uncover hidden reservoirs of resistance within institutions.

As part of a comprehensive Infection Control plan, the DiversiLab™ System will help Infection Control Practitioners track the source and spread of microbial infections and contamination more quickly, more accurately, and more cost-effectively than any other solution on the market. This will help reduce overall costs of Healthcare Acquired Infections.

The DiversiLab System complements bioMérieux's suite of solutions: BacT/ALERT® 3D, VITEK® 2, NucliSENS® EasyQ® platforms, STELLARA® and OBSERVA®