Can A Catheter-Related Urinary Tract Infection?

Catheters are partially flexible tubes that collect urine from the bladder and leads into a drainage bag. They are often recommended by doctors if the patient is unable to control when they urinate, if they are leaking urine or if they’re unable to empty their bladder when they need to. These things can be caused by kidney stones, surgeries on various parts of the body, spinal cord injury and other conditions. (Cafasso J, 2015) Catheter-related urinary tract infection (UTI) occurs because urethral catheters inject organisms into the bladder and promote colonisation by providing a surface for bacterial adhesion and causing mucous related irritation (Brusch JL, 2015). The respective people at Flinders Nano-Scale took that information and created 2 coatings that could prevent the bacteria colonising on the catheters. These two coating are

The first and most plausible reason is that because the catheters were bent almost 180 degrees to fit into the wells, the coatings and the outside of the catheters have possibly snapped and have begun to leak latex into the cells and killed them. This was highly likely and a few strategies were thought of to alleviate that problem in the future. If bigger wells were used, the catheters wouldn’t have been as bent and the coatings wouldn’t have snapped. Another possibly reason for the cells to die was the possibility of extra ethanol being added to the wells as the catheters were sterilised (in ethanol) before being placed into the wells. This however, wasn’t as plausible because after talking with another expert, she said that the amount of ethanol needed to kill the cells was not enough to kill the amount that it did. This brought up the thought that it was maybe enough to hinder the growth or stunt it slightly. This could be alleviated in the future by leaving the catheter pieces much longer than an hour to dry them properly and