Post-operative surgical wound infection

The occurrence of post-operative wound infection was studied respectively over an eight month period in the University Hospital, Kuala Lumpur. One hundred and seventy four (3.4%) surgical wounds out of 5129 operations became infected. The clean wound infection rate was 2.9%, rising to 5.4% and 12.2% for clean-contaminated and contaminated surgical wounds respectively. Of the wound infections, 80.8% occurred within the first two weeks post-operatively. Bacteriological studies revealed that the commonest bacterial isolates were Staphylococcus aureus (36.1%), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (15.4%) and Klebsiella species (10.1%).