 |
| CNN's advice for KPCs? - Eat Yogurt |
In a recent piece on CNN,
Elizabeth Cohen discusses the recent
KPC outbreak in SoCal. She offers some advice to patients and families as to how they can help prevent these 'superbug' infections under the heading "sorting fact from fiction." Let's go through this: 1) Wash hands - check 2) Remove unnecessary catheters - check and ....3) Eat Yogurt.?!? What the? To be fair, when she was challenged by the other news person, she backed off and said yogurt prevented some infections and not specifically KPCs, but why include it in the graphic? Was yogurt the fiction to the hand hygiene fact? Is the data even suggestive that yogurt "prevents" C. diff? Maybe this is a case of
powerpoint making us stupid because she felt the need to have at least three bullet points per slide?
A
study in Altern Ther Health Med from 2005 found no benefit of a non-dairy probiotic on the gut microflora including Klebsiella. The CNN article quotes my long lost co-fellow Mitch Schwaber, who was the author of the
Israeli KPC outbreak that we highlighted last week. Hopefully Mitch will be in Dallas and I can ask him about the yogurt...
They are possibly associating this with studies similar to the ones reviewed in the 2006 meta-analysis by Lynne V. McFarland, Ph.D. which showed promise in the potential use of certain probiotics (Saccharomyces boulardii, Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG, and probiotic mixtures) to assist in the treatment of antibiotic associated diarrhea and S. boulardii for c-diff infection, but this is a far cry from "eat your yogurt".
ReplyDeleteSource:
http://www.healingpediatrics.com/articles/C.diff%20probiotics.pdf
I love this simple checklist! I will query IHI immediately to see if they can add "Eat yogurt" to any of their bundles (the MRSA bundle needs some tweaking, I think).
ReplyDeleteThis also brings up some philanthropic opportunities. We currently name our hospital pavilions after big donors...I can already envision our new "Dannon" wing!