Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Sarah Fouch. Welcome to this short recording, where we will be considering Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the different clinical conditions this organism is associated with and the virulence factors that it can produce to help it produce disease and the types of disease that it's associated with.

There are many subspecies of pseudomonads. However, the most common type of Pseudomonas that we isolate within the clinical laboratory is Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We can identify different subspecies using biochemical and genetic tests. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is what we call a ubiquitous organism, which means it can be found everywhere. Good examples here are soil, decaying organic matter, vegetation and also water. Now, with this being a ubiquitous pathogen, it's actually a bit of a problem, particularly in hospital environments. Now, if we think about patients receiving flowers from their relatives, Pseudomonas can survive in the flower water. Pseudomonas is one of the reasons why sometimes flowers are not allowed in oncology wards, because actually they can be a source of infection to very vulnerable patients. But Pseudomonas can also survive in sinks and toilets, anywhere it can form a biofilm. If you look at a tap, if you can see a biofilm forming around the tap, this could have Pseudomonas associated with it. Now the concern here is that some Pseudomonas aeruginosa can survive in disinfectants. When mopping the hospital environment, the hospital floor, we need to make sure that we're using the correct disinfectants because we could be spreading Pseudomonas aeruginosa around this healthcare environment. Now, Pseudomonas can be carried as normal flora in immunocompromised and hospitalised patients. So this can also be problematic because we don't want Pseudomonas aeruginosa in that kind of environment. Within the laboratory environment,