Research money: Dr Derrick Crook with colleagues at the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre
An innovative scheme to give germs like MRSA and clostridium difficile "barcodes" to try to track the sources of infection is being piloted at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital.
A consortium of doctors and health professionals, led by the John Radcliffe's Dr Derrick Crook, has been given a £5m grant to pilot the scheme in the hospital.
Dr Crook, an expert in infectious disease and chemical microbiology, said the aim was to use cutting-edge technology to identify the sources of infection and use that to put procedures in place to stop it spreading.
He said: "Every germ has a slightly different 'bar code' unless they have been recently transmitted, so if we get the same bar code you are able to trace it and match it to the source.
"At the moment you cannot easily tell where the germ causing an infection has come from, but this provides a very direct way of identifying the way a germ is travelling through a hospital or community."
The 50-strong team will be focusing on four bacteria, including MRSA.
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Dr Crook compared the process to DNA profiling, where DNA left at a scene can be matched to that taken from the perpetrator of the crime.
He said the hospital had seen a dramatic decline in the number of cases of MRSA and c-diff in the past two years.
He said there was a 30 per cent drop in the number of c-diff cases, up to 50 per cent in some areas, and a 50 per cent reduction in the number of MRSA cases.
There were about 50 cases of MRSA in the blood stream in the most recent figures for last year, and 400 c-diff, compared to about 800 in 2004. There are 15 to 20 outbreaks of norovirus each year at the hospital.
The money to fund the five-year programme has come from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health Research and the Wellcome Trust.
Similar research into malaria, funded by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, is currently being carried out at Oxford University.
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