About That Health Care Icon Dangling Around Your Neck: Do We Have Some Cleaning Up to Do?

Stethoscopes as Pathogen Reservoirs The diaphragm and bell at the “business end” of a stethoscope that make contact with the patient’s skin have long been recognized as possible sources of infection due to their frequent contamination with pathologic organisms commonly found in hospitalized adults, as well as children, infants, and neonates. Applying a contaminated stethoscope headpiece to every patient a nurse encounters exposes every one of those patients to all of the pathogens of that nurse’s past patient assignments. For nurses who work in areas such as the emergency department, where a myriad of body fluids and external contaminants may await the nurse’s contact, the load of pathogens can multiply exponentially. None of this would be especially problematic, of course, if health care professionals had an unblemished record of cleansing their stethoscopes with each use. However, although we may have made some progress about the necessity of handwashing, there has been little to no transfer of that fomite-fighting tenacity directed at cleansing our stethoscopes. Virtually every survey Editorial