Medizone International, Inc. has reported that an entire ward at a public hospital has remained MRSA-free for 6 months after a major outbreak waws quashed —  thanks to the introduction of a new hospital room disinfection technology.

In early June 2013, seven patient rooms on a 14 room ward at Quinte Health Care's Belleville General Hospital in Ontario, Canada were quarantined after being hit by a rapidly spreading strain of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). MRSA is one of the most common causes of serious staph infections acquired in hospitals, globally.

"On average we have had one or two new MRSA cases per month on the ward. In June we noted a rapidly spreading MRSA problem on the ward that reached seven rooms over a short period of time," said Dr. Dick Zoutman, chief of staff for the hospital. "That is when we began using Medizone International's AsepticSure(R) room disinfection system. It is the only system we know of that can actually eliminate 100 percent of infective pathogens with a single room treatment. We have learned that obtaining even a 99.9 percent bacterial kill is not enough, as the remaining 0.1% of bacteria immediately begin growing back causing the problem of infection to start all over again in a few short hours. What is more, AsepticSure is proven to kill bacterial spores that can lurk in hospital rooms for months."

Dr. Zoutman is a co-inventor along with Dr. Michael E. Shannon of the AsepticSure system.

"The MRSA was immediately and entirely eliminated from the ward," he continued. "The AsepticSure system was straightforward to use and quick, with complete room disinfection occurring in an hour. To prove to ourselves that the AsepticSure system was working, we performed cultures of 120 surfaces of the treated rooms before and after the AsepticSure system was used. However, the longer term effects were not fully appreciated until after a six-month follow up had been completed. Only then was it realized that not only had the rooms remained free of MRSA, no further cases of MRSA were noted on the ward during this period."

"It is noteworthy in this regard," stated Dr. Michael E. Shannon, president of Medizone International and a former director general of the Laboratory Center for Disease Control, Health Canada, "that in addition to full room disinfection, all support equipment associated with each contaminated room were also disinfected using AsepticSure — and this may have played an important role as well in virtually eliminating MRSA from the ward. These mobile pieces of patient care equipment are notoriously hard to clean by hand. AsepticSure made disinfecting them very easy.

"Given that hospital acquired infections are now considered to be the fourth leading cause of death in both the United States and Canada, this could be a game changer."

The cost of which the United States Center for Disease Control places the disease is $25,000 per new infection, Shannon added.