Rapid response to infections from a county fair improved patient treatment
This summer, several people contracted Shiga toxin-producing E. coli at the Mesa County Fair in Colorado. Typically, detecting the bacteria and tracing it back to the county fair would take weeks, says Angie Silva, microbiology manager at St. Mary’s Hospital, where the patients were seen. But thanks to rapid molecular testing with the VERIGENE® System, she and her team identified the problem quickly enough to dispatch county health officials to the fairgrounds for an epidemiological investigation while the fair was still underway.
Silva began using the VERIGENE System in 2014; she has since adopted its bloodstream, respiratory, and gastrointestinal infection tests. The rapid, flexible molecular diagnostics platform is a particularly good fit at St. Mary’s, a 346-bed hospital serving a large and diverse rural community between Salt Lake City and Denver. “We cover everything from the routine cases to the sickest of the sick,” Silva says, noting that every instrument in the clinical lab has to be able to run many different tests to earn its keep.
When three patients turned up in a single day with Shiga toxin-positive results — a finding detected with the VERIGENE® Enteric Pathogens Test (EP) — Silva’s team immediately notified the county health department and prompted an investigation. “The fair wasn’t even over before we knew it was the source of these infections,” she says. “That’s definitely the first time we’ve seen this kind of rapid response.” County health officials were able to broadcast a warning for people with relevant symptoms, allowing medical professionals to treat other patients more quickly and effectively.
Prior to the VERIGENE System, Silva says, conventional testing methods would have taken as long as two weeks to generate results about those first three patients. County or state health officials would have been called in long after the fair was over, making epidemiological studies that much more challenging. And during that time of uncertainty, affected patients and their healthcare teams would have been in the dark. “The rapid response time is so invaluable,” Silva says. With the VERIGENE EP Test, her team can turn results around in as little as three hours.
According to Silva, the VERIGENE System has enabled her team to generate better results for the hospital’s patient population. “Prior to using molecular panels, we had about a 2 percent positivity rate on all of our stool cultures. We are now around 12 percent positivity,” she says. “I honestly feel like we are doing a much better job. I can prove by my statistics that we are definitely recovering more than we ever had before, and at a pretty significant rate.”
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