Hospital Hygiene (Kampmeier lab)

Hospital-acquired infections and pathogen transmissions pose a major threat to clinical routine. Hygienic strategies to prevent these events rely on bundle measures including hand hygiene, environmental disinfection and contact precautions. The latter constitute a reliable method of breaking transmission chains, but have also been identified as leading to unintended adverse consequences, mainly regarding the quality of individual medical care and patients‘ psychological well-being.

Our group wants to gain knowledge about which patients benefit from intensified hygienic measures to prevent invasive infections on the one hand and to avoid impairment in patient care on the other. In this context, we concentrate on the identification of pathogen-specific as well as patient- and environment-associated factors in order to establish an individualized, risk-adapted medicine for infection prevention.

In particular, we focus on the following questions:

• Do the current hospital hygiene measures offer adequate protection against hospital-acquired pathogens?
• Which characteristics of infectious agents are associated with an increased virulence or probability of transmission?
• What are the most important reservoirs of hospital-acquired infections?
• To what extent do hospital-acquired pathogens change during ongoing therapy in the human host and in the environment?
• Can hospital hygiene measures be reduced in a targeted manner?