AUTHOR=Ribeiro Lucas Ferreira , Lopes Erica M. , Kishi Luciano T. , Ribeiro Liliane Fraga Costa , Menegueti Mayra Gonçalves , Gaspar Gilberto Gambero , Silva-Rocha Rafael , Guazzaroni María-Eugenia TITLE=Microbial Community Profiling in Intensive Care Units Expose Limitations in Current Sanitary Standards JOURNAL=Frontiers in Public Health VOLUME=7 YEAR=2019 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2019.00240 DOI=10.3389/fpubh.2019.00240 ISSN=2296-2565 ABSTRACT=
Hospital-associated infections (HAIs) are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in intensive care units (ICUs) and neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Organisms causing these infections are often present on surfaces around the patient. Given that microbiota may vary across different ICUs, the HAI-related microbial signatures within these units remain underexplored. In this study, we use deep-sequencing analyses to explore and compare the structure of bacterial communities at inanimate surfaces of the ICU and NICU wards of The Medical School Clinics Hospital (Brazil). The data revealed that NICU presents higher biodiversity than ICU and surfaces closest to the patient showed a peculiar microbiota, distinguishing one unit from the other. Several facultative anaerobes or obligate anaerobes HAI-related genera were classified as biomarkers for the NICU, whereas