Intraoperative contamination of synthetic vascular grafts. Effect of glove change before graft implantation. A prospective randomised study.

Objectives: to investigate the incidence of intraoperative graft contamination, bacterial species and the influence of change of surgeon's gloves on contamination.

Design: a prospective randomised study.

Materials And Methods: forty patients had implantation of synthetic vascular grafts. All patients received intraoperative cloxacillin (2.0 g) or clindamycin (0.6 g) intravenously. The procedures were randomised to two groups: Group 1 - surgeons changed the gloves before the first contact with the vascular prosthesis and Group 2 - operation without glove change. The growth of all bacterial species from graft segments and from the gloves was recorded. The susceptibility to antibiotics was tested.

Results: the number of contaminated grafts was similar in the two groups. Growth of bacteria was recorded from 92.5% (37/40) of the graft segments and 33% (51/156) of glove imprints. Of the cultured species, 75% and 47%, respectively, were identified as coagulase-negative staphylococci (CNS). Twenty-eight per cent of CNS were resistant to cloxacillin, 15% to clindamycin, and 10% to cloxacillin and clindamycin. In all, 25% of the CNS strains were resistant to the prophylactic antibiotic used. In 50% of cases, the antibiogram of the CNS strain recovered from gloves agreed with that of the strain harvested from the graft.

Conclusions: a high incidence of graft contamination was found which was not reduced by changing gloves. However, changing gloves did seem to reduce the number of bacterial species.