No wonder antibiotic-resistant bugs are spreading in hospitals: if cleaners over-dilute their solutions, washing surfaces with disinfectant may make things worse.
, a bacterium responsible for severe chest infections, can become tolerant to the commonly used mild disinfectant . The bug develops mutations that enable it to expel the disinfectant. Worse still, tolerant strains can also shrug off , a antibiotic widely used to treat gut and urinary tract infections.
Tolerance only developed when the bacteria were exposed to dilute solutions of the disinfectant. “If you use them wrongly by diluting, you’re asking for trouble,” says at the National University of Ireland in Galway, who led the research that revealed the problem. “The message is that you must use them properly, to the concentration stated on the bottle.”
Fleming found that bugs pushed to develop resistance to ciprofloxacin were also automatically tolerant to the disinfectant too, so the danger spreads both ways. The best solution is to use bleach, to which no bacteria are known to be tolerant. Fleming plans to find out if bugs can be trained to tolerate even bleach if it’s diluted enough.
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