A hospital or medical clinic might be the last place you’d expect to pick up a nasty infection, but approximately 1.7 million Americans do each year, resulting in nearly 100,000 deaths from infection-related complications and roughly $30 billion in direct medical costs.
The biggest culprits, experts say — accounting for two-thirds of these infections — are medical devices like catheters, stents, heart valves and pacemakers, whose surfaces often become covered with harmful bacterial films. But a novel surface treatment developed by a UCLA-led team of scientists could help improve the safety of these devices and ease the economic burden on the health care system.
