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By Robert Roos
icanNEWS staff

(icanNEWS) – Gloves reduce but don't eliminate the risk of contamination of healthcare workers' (HCWs') hands with vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), according to a study published in the March 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases.

In the study at Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, the use of gloves was effective 71% of the time in preventing VRE contamination of HCWs' hands when the workers had contact with VRE-colonized patients, says the report by Allan R. Tenorio and colleagues.

The study involved 10 VRE-colonized patients and 50 HCWs. A sterile buffer sampling solution was used to test each HCW's hands for VRE before contact with a patient. The workers donned gloves before patient contact and removed them afterward; the workers' hands and the gloves then were tested for VRE contamination.

Six of the 50 HCWs were found to have a patient's strain of VRE on their hands before patient contact; these were excluded from the analysis. Of the remaining 44 workers, 17 (39%) acquired a patient's VRE strain on their gloves during patient care. After removing the gloves, 5 of these 17 HCWs (29%) also had the patient's VRE strain on their hands, while the other 12 (71%) did not. Three workers who touched objects in patient rooms without touching patients acquired VRE on their gloves but not on their hands. One HCW had VRE on his hands after glove removal even though there was no VRE contamination on the gloves.

Factors that were associated with VRE contamination of the gloves included duration of contact, contact with a patient's body fluids, presence of diarrhea in a patient, mean VRE colony counts on a patient's skin, and the number of patient body sites colonized with VRE. "All health care workers who had contact with a patient with diarrhea acquired VRE on their gloves, compared with 12 (44%) of 27 health care workers who had contact with a patient without diarrhea," the report says.

"Our data support the potential benefit of universal gloving of health care workers who are participating in patient care activities at institutions with a high prevalence of VRE colonization," the authors state. "However, gloving does not completely prevent contamination of health care workers' hands, and hand washing or 'de-germing' is necessary after glove removal."

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