Prevention is Key!

Greetings! Last week, I discussed bacterial growth and the bacterial growth curve. As promised, this week, I will be talking about the prevention of infection in prosthetic devices. Before I begin, I would like to go back about two weeks to my post "How to Control Someone Else's Computer." I left off without a solution to my problem. After careful research and multiple trials with various programs, I finally found one that works, WinSCP. It allows for transfer of data and remote access using a terminal window even if you are trying to connect a Mac and a PC. If you are interested in downloading this program, Click Here!

To continue investigating The Intriguing Connection, I looked at infection and bionics. My first look at this was through prevention. No one that gets a prosthetic hopes for infection to set in, so they take various means to prevent it from happening. There is no clearly defined guidelines for preventing prosthetic device infections. To begin, I want to give two examples of how the implantation process can facilitate infection. During and after implantation, there can be an inflammatory response around the foreign material hindering leukocytes to create a phagocytic response. In simpler terms, your body is unable to clean up harmful foreign particles, bacteria and dying/dead cells. Also, during implantation of joint prostheses, if polymethylmethacrylate cement is used, it polymerizes in situ (in its original place) by an exothermic reaction. This intense heat, exceeding 100 degrees C, may cause local tissue necrosis which favors bacterial growth.

Here are some general principles of infection prevention in prosthetic devices to follow: Preoperative Measures, Intraoperative Measures, and Postoperative Measures. Preoperative measures include treating or controlling any acute or chronic physical condition, giving special attention to any skin conditions, teaching good hygiene, and reducing hospital duration prior to surgery. Intraoperative measures include ultra-clean air in the operating rooms, careful skin preparation around the operative site, wound irrigation with saline or saline-antibiotic solutions, and antibiotic prophylaxis to prevent surgical site infections. Postoperative measures include removing any urinary and intravascular catheters or surgical drains as soon as the clinical condition allows. Commonly, the infection will happen in the early postoperative state rather than the late.

Side Note

The professor I am working with at the University of Arizona was an expert consultant on the new movie Chappie. Below is the featurette:

Additionally, he is quoted in several news articles. Click on any of the following titles to read more about Artificial Intelligence and Chappie: Could Chappie's robot-policed future come pass?, 'Chappie' Doesn't Think Robots Will Destroy the World, Is a Self-Aware Robot Like Chappie Possible?, and 'Chappie': How Realistic Is the Film's Artificial Intelligence?. 

Stay tuned for next week as I go in depth on specific treatments for the most commonly used prosthetic devices! 

Sources

"Phagocytosis." Phagocytosis. Web. 10 Mar. 2015. <http://textbookofbacteriology.net/Bact100/phago_defense.html>.

Simionescu, Ramona, and Donald Kennedy. "Prevention of Infection in Prosthetic Devices." The Bionic Human. Ed. Frank Johnson and Katherine Virgo. Totowa: Humana, 2006. Print.

"Phagocyte." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 10 Mar. 2015. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phagocyte>.