A new real-time testing tool will help spot contamination in B.C.’s largest health authority by analyzing concentrations of cellular "power plants" left behind on high-touch areas like elevator buttons, washroom door knobs and toilet seats.
The tool, announced by Fraser Health Aug. 7, allows management overseeing housekeeping staff to swab surfaces in hospitals and long-term care homes. Those samples are then placed in a luminometer, a device that measures organic matter known as adenosine triphosphate (ATP). A chemical found in every cell of living organisms, ATP stores and gives cells the energy they need to function.
A higher reading of ATP, the more likely the surface is contaminated by a virus of bacteria, according to Jody Miller Elliot, Fraser Health's director of housekeeping strategies and initiatives.
“We can swab high touch surfaces even if someone has COVID,” she said. “It fills the gap where we visually can’t see contamination.”
Miller Elliot said the tool will help take a burden off busy labs, and will especially be useful to avoid the spread of highly infectious bacteria such as carbapenemase-producing organisms (CPO) that are increasingly resistant to antibiotics.
“It is very serious. It can cause death,” she said of CPO. “Using the ATP testing is something we can do to stop it from spreading,”
The ATP tests are the latest technology deployed in the health authority. Fraser Health also uses germ-fighting robots and cleaning wipes that first paint a surface blue and then fade to clear if the cleaning is thorough.
The new ATP tool is one more layer of protection to make sure the health authority's cleaning and disinfection protocols are working, said Miller Elliot.
Fraser Health is responsible for the delivery of hospital and community-based medicine for 1.9 million people in a region stretching from the Fraser Canyon to Burnaby.
