Table 1.
Time-line of the tasks.
Figure 1.
(A) Map of the unit. Areas for outpatients and inpatients are in yellow and blue, respectively. Crosses indicate the location of patients with at least one P. aeruginosa isolate according to the case definitions (red, incident case; green, prevalent case; see text for details). L1 to L4 indicate the sites from which Pseudomonas spp. were isolated: L1, soap dispenser; L2 soap dispenser; L3 and L4 water outlets. (B) Drugs deposit and preparation room where the contaminated soap dispenser (L2) was placed.
Table 2.
Characteristics of patients included in the study.
Figure 2.
The diagram shows the 10 incident cases (with respective codes) identified throughout the 16 time fractions (T1–T16) of the retrospective cohort study. Red and blue squares denote died and survived patients, respectively. The incidence rate per 1000 person-days with 95% CI and the total time at risk is reported for each time fraction.
Table 3.
Clinical and epidemiological features of 18 cases of P. aeruinosa infections identified throughout the investigation.
Table 4.
Association between Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection and selected characteristics.
Figure 3.
Epidemiological typing of clinical and environmental P. aeruginosa isolates.
(A) RAPD analysis with primers 208, 228, 241, 272, 275, 277, 287 and ERIC 1, as indicated on top of electropherograms. (B) PFGE analysis of P. aeruginosa isolates. The dendrogram was generated with BioNumerics (Applied Maths) using the unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic averages (UPGMA) and the Dice coefficient. The similarity (%) between isolates is shown at each node of the dendrogram.M is the molecular weight marker (bp); 10 P. aeruginosa from sputum (patient 10); 11 P. aeruginosa from blood culture (patient 11); 13 P. aeruginosa from central venous catheter swab (patient 13); L2 P. aeruginosa from soap; L3 and L4 P. aeruginosa from water.
Table 5.
Overall epidemiological outcomes at the end of the outbreak, according to the assumption that case 8 was the index case and the soap dispenser the actual environmental reservoir.