Wound Infection: Contributing Factors and Selected Techniques for Prevention

摘要

Infection is a major factor in delayed wound healing and an important cause of dehiscence after wound closure. Knowledge of the contributing factors to development of wound infections will provide the clinician with an improved ability to prevent itsoccurrence. Wound infection is defined as the presence of replicat-ing microorganisms within a wound with subsequent host injury.1 Infection must be distinguished from wound contamination (microorganisms are not repli-cating) and wound colonization (replicating microor-ganisms are present but do not cause host injury). Interestingly, some recent studies of dogs suggest that the organisms that infect a wound may be a subset of those organisms that colonize the wound site.