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Standard Blood and Body Fluid Precautions

المؤلف:  Barry Chess

المصدر:  Talaros Foundations In Microbiology Basic Principles 2024

الجزء والصفحة:  12th E , P 441-442

2026-09-09

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Medical and dental settings require stringent measures to prevent the spread of infectious agents from patient to patient, from patient to worker, and from worker to patient. But even with precautions, the rate of such infections can be rather high. An established body of evidence indicates that more than one-third of health-care-acquired infections could be pre vented by consistent and rigorous infection control methods.

Previously, control guidelines were disease-specific, and clearly identified infections were managed with particular restrictions and techniques. With this arrangement, personnel tended to handle materials labeled infectious with much greater care than those that were not so labeled. The AIDS epidemic spurred a reexamination of that policy. Because of the potential for patients with undiagnosed infections, the CDC laid down more-stringent guide lines for handling patients and body substances. These guidelines have been termed Standard Precautions (SPs), because they are based on the assumption that all patient specimens could harbor infectious agents and so must be treated with the same degree of care. They also include body substance isolation (BSI) techniques to be used in known cases of infection.

It is worth mentioning that these precautions are designed to protect all individuals in the clinical setting—patients, workers, and the public alike. In general, they include techniques designed to prevent contact with pathogens and contamination and, if prevention is not possible, to take purposeful measures to decontaminate potentially infectious materials. See appendix B for a more detailed list of SPs.