Hospital-acquired infections – better diagnostics for rapid treatment

A Hospital. A place where you generally don't like to go, but are glad that it's there when you need it. A place that smells of disinfectant. It's called ‘clinically clean’. And then the inappropriate-sounding aliteration ‘hospital germ’. A place where you are supposed to get well becomes a threat to your health from pathogens that are often so persistent that there are hardly any effective drugs against them. Multi-resistant bacteria. How can that be? And above all: how can we deal with it? Prof Susanne Häußler and her Molecular Bacteriology research group at the HZI and the Twincore in Hanover are investigating this. In this episode, we talk about the clever strategies bacteria use to become multi-resistant hospital germs, how ways of dealing with them are being researched and what we can all do to protect ourselves and vulnerable patients from them.