Team:Tunghai TAPG/Description
Try to imagine that you are admitted to a hospital, no matter gaining an illness, undergoing surgery, or even company your family or friend, then you may better notice that you have 5 percent chance of contracting a HAI.
What is HAI?
HAI also known to be hospital-acquired infection is a kind of nosocomial infection that is defined as an infection acquired from the hospital. These kinds of infections are usually acquired in a hospital, nursing homes, etc. According to CDC, HAI is divided into four section parts including Central line-associated Bloodstream Infection (CLABSI), Catheter-associated Urinary Tract Infections (CAUTI), Surgical Site Infection (SSI) and Ventilator-associated Pneumonia (VAP).
Fig.1. Four parts of HAI.
How serious is the HAI?
If a patient contracts HAI, the length of stay in the hospital increase by 17.6 days. Also according to statistic, HAI kills more people each year than the total death of Breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. Besides, it affects millions and billions of people annually.
Fig.2. The number of the death of different disease.
Hospitals are fraught with bacteria and other microbes just waiting to infect patients who are often more susceptible to infections due to their illnesses. This is especially concerning as the rate of multidrug-resistant organisms continues to rise and cause infections that are becoming increasingly more difficult to treat.
Infection control is an important part of the culture in all hospitals, and environmental cleaning and disinfection is a key component of a comprehensive plan. Rigorous cleaning methods are required to ensure that rooms and equipment are safe for patients. However, some experts have said it does not often take the forefront role it should.
What can we do?
In this year, Tunghai iGEM is going to apply our novel antimicrobial peptide to an air purifier in order to solve the HAI problem. Hospital is flooded with Multi-resistant bacteria, which is often called superbug that has the potential to cause infection. We design an effective peptide JJ01 from MAP0403 which has been found with effective antimicrobial activity but serious side effect hemolysis. And then we attempt to mass-produce it through genetically engineering. Last we calculate bacteria growth curve to assist our hypothesis and demonstrate others
As part of our human practices we upload lots of articles to make people know more about our project. Different events for science popularization have been created in order to make the subject better understood.
