Life in a Life Island

Infection in hospitals runs in a vicious circle. Many a patient enters because of infection, and the doctors must try not only to cure him but to keep his germs from other patients who are particularly susceptible because their resistance is low. Achieving the necessary germ-free atmosphere, though, is far easier said than done.

Last week, at the Medical College of Virginia Hospital in Richmond, Dr. Boyd Withers Haynes Jr. had two burn patients recovering rapidly in virtually germ-free surroundings, thanks to an ingenious device. The "Life Island," as its inventor, Frank E. Matthews, an ex-Navyman, calls it, looks like a plastic bubble completely enclosing the hospital bed. It has a console of Buck Rogers gadgets at the foot. Dr. Haynes is testing two Life Islands for the U.S. Army Surgeon General's office, and there is another at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

Zipped In. After Dr. Haynes's patients had had their burns treated, the rest of their bodies was scrubbed with detergent. Their heads were shampooed and their fingernails trimmed and cleaned. To keep down bacteria that normally live inside the nose, Dr. Haynes gave them an antibiotic. Then the patients were put to bed in the pre-sterilized Life Island, and its long zipper was closed.

But they had no need to suffer claustrophobia. As soon as they were zipped in, the plastic envelope was inflated with double-filtered air, delivered under pressure. The envelope is transparent; they could see all around, and they could talk through it without raising their voices.

When a nurse wanted to give them food or medicine or a bedpan, she took it from a sterile cabinet, pushed it through an outer port in the console, and closed the door. Automatically, ultraviolet radiation was switched on to kill off late-arriving bacteria. Then she slipped her hands into the long gloves built into the side of the plastic. With these, she could reach any part of the interior. She opened the inner port of the air-lock and passed the article to the patient. When he had finished, whether with meal tray or bedpan, he put it in a plastic bag that went out through the air-lock after a pause for ultraviolet to sterilize its exterior.

Working with her gloved hands through the side, the nurse can take a patient's temperature or dress his wounds. There are electrical connections embedded in the plastic so that many tests and treatments can be given without destroying the internal sterility.

Lister's Dream. Protection against infection is especially important for burn patients because their wounds are large and the dead tissue is a rich soil for bacteria. It is no less important for transplant patients and for many others on high doses of cortisone-type drugs, whose resistance to infection is reduced.

Some pioneering surgeons are already putting patients into similar plastic bags and performing major operations through glove ports. It should not be long before many patients can have a truly sterile operation, fulfilling Joseph Lister's dream of aseptic surgery, and then be moved into the sterile isolator for recovery--something that not even Lister dared to hope for.

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