An Annals of Internal Medicine Among overview of studies of promising cleaning tactics for reducing healthcare-associated infections (HAI) found no clear winner, according to an article on the Infection Control Today website.

Few studies measured patient outcomes or focused on newer technologies, and even fewer compared cleaning tactics against one another, the article said.

“We found that the research to date does provide a good overall picture of the before and after results of particular cleaning agents and approaches to monitoring cleanliness. Researchers now need to take the next step and compare the various ways of cleaning these surfaces and monitoring their cleanliness in order to determine which are the most effective in driving down the rate of hospital-acquired infections,” Jennifer Han, MD, the study’s lead author, said in the article. 

The research also found relatively few studies that focused on changes in HAI rates or the presence of pathogens on patients. 

Read the article.