The state of hand rub dispensers in healthcare settings - a multicenter assessment in 19 German healthcare facilities.

Background: Hand hygiene is one of the most important hygiene measures to prevent healthcare-associated infections. Well-functioning hand rub dispensers are the foundation of hand hygiene but are often overlooked in research. As the point of origin for hand hygiene, dispensers not only promote compliance through ease of use, but also strongly influence the amount of hand rub used per disinfection.

Alcohol-based hand rubs can fulfil efficacy requirements of EN 1500 in 15 seconds.

Aim: Correct hand hygiene is widely regarded as an important measure to prevent healthcare-associated infections. Guidelines on how to perform hand antisepsis are often inspired by laboratory tests that focus on reproducibility rather than ease of use. These cumbersome recommendations can become barriers to hand hygiene, as optimal user acceptance requires a small rub volume and a short application time with an intuitive rubbing technique.

Workflows and locations matter - insights from electronic hand hygiene monitoring into the use of hand rub dispensers across diverse hospital wards.

Background: While healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) affect approximately 3.2-6.5% of hospitalised patients in the US and Europe, improving hand hygiene (HH) could reduce HAI rates.

The impact of activating an empathic focus during COVID19 on healthcare workers motivation for hand hygiene compliance in moments serving the protection of others: a randomized controlled trial study.

Aim: The "Five moments of hand hygiene" (World Health Organization 2009) can be classified into moments of hand hygiene before and after patient care. Based on research indicating that hand hygiene compliance differs with regard to moments before and after patient care, this research evaluates the effectiveness of an empathy-based intervention in motivating hand hygiene compliance with regard to moments before patient care which protect vulnerable individuals from contamination and infection.

Subjects And Method: An online experiment involving 68 healthcare professionals working at a German hospital during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic investigates whether instructing healthcare professionals to consider consequences for others (vs for themselves) if they contracted SARS-CoV-2 promotes hand hygiene compliance referring to moments before (vs after) patient care.

Experimental infection of sheep with visna/maedi virus via the conjunctival space.

Experiments were performed to determine whether visna/maedi virus (VMV), a small ruminant lentivirus (SRLV), could infect sheep via ocular tissues. The EV1 strain of VMV was administered into the conjunctival space of uninfected sheep, and the animals monitored for the presence of provirus DNA and anti-VMV antibodies in blood. The results showed that provirus DNA appeared in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of all animals within a few weeks of receiving either 10(6) TCID50 or 10(3) TCID50 of VMV.