Occurrence of Nosocomial Pathogens in Health Care Workers Cell Phones From a Teaching Hospital in Southwest Iran

Background: Mobile phones have become one of the necessary means of life and they are commonly used almost everywhere by every population. One of these groups is health care workers (HCWs) who widely used cell phones. This population have higher chance of exposure to pathogens and colonized microorganisms on their cell phones can transmit easily to the patients by hands of health care workers. Objectives: Given to widespread prevalence of nosocomial infections, this study aimed to determine the frequency and trends of antibiotic resistance of common nosocomial pathogens in HCWs cell phones from a teaching hospital in southwest Iran. Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study during a three-month period in 2016, 100 samples were collected from cell phones of HCWs in different wards of Nemazee hospital, Shiraz, Iran. Samples collected from each cell phone by a moistened cotton swap dipped in normal saline and transported to laboratory in tryptone soy broth containing tube. Identification of bacterial isolates was done by standards microbiologic procedures. Antibiotic susceptibility profiles were determined using disk diffusion method in accordance with CLSI recommendation. Results: In overall, 72% of cell phones were contaminated with different types of bacteria. Totally 127 bacterial isolates obtained from contaminated cell phones, of which staphylococci with 68.5% was the predominant bacteria. Antibiotic susceptibility results revealed that 39.1% of staphylococci isolates were methicillin-resistant. Moreover, the most of staphylococci isolates were resistance to erythromycin (79.3%) and clindamycin (60.9%). Among the studied risk factors, there was a significant association between the daily use of cell phone in the hospital environment and history of ear or dermal infections with risk of methicillin-resistant staphylococci acquisition. Conclusion: The results highlight the potential role of cell phones as a source of nosocomial infections in hospital environments. Therefore, restricted use of cell phones in hospitals can effectively decrease risk of pathogens dissemination by hands of HCWs .