COVID-19 has shaken up the world in 2020 and will continue to do so in 2021. Healthcare systems in many countries have come to their capacity limits, and patients, doctors, nurses, and medical institutions are evidently suffering from that. The pandemic is a life-changing experience for most of us and will have long-term effects at the societal as well as individual levels. The public has become substantially more aware of infection risks.

Infections can come in the form of a global pandemic like COVID-19 or, for example, in the form of long-known healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) like the Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Even though COVID-19, at the moment, naturally, is much more in the focus of public interest, HAIs are possibly even more deadly at an individual level and in the long run. In the exceptional year 2020, a shockingly high total number of 36,767 people officially died with COVID-19 in Germany. At the same time, however, there is also a terrifying number of 30,000 casualties, which the German Society for Hospital Hygiene estimates to fall victim to HAIs every year. This shows that even after the eradication of COVID-19, which hopefully can be achieved within the near future, as a global society, we still have other potentially similarly or even more dangerous infectious diseases to fight.

Syntellix is actively preventing HAIs with its unique MAGNEZIX® implants that received CE approval and product registration in more than 65 countries around the globe. Implant removal surgeries, including all corresponding risks to human health, such as anaesthesia risks, refracture risks, but also HAI risks and even COVID-19 exposure, become obsolete if surgeons use MAGNEZIX® implants.

In 2021, this medical revolution will further benefit patients’ health, reduce costs for increasingly pressured healthcare systems, and even ease doctors’ lives because it allows them to spend their valuable time on more important surgeries instead of avoidable and unnecessary implant removals. But above all, large-scale use of MAGNEZIX® implants may soon save tens of thousands of lives. The United States alone have an estimated 1.7 million healthcare-associated diseases per year, resulting in approximately 99,000 deaths.[1] China and India with their estimated population of 2.8 billion people have even more HAI casualties that can potentially be avoided after MAGNEZIX® implants will have been registered in these markets.

This leads to the conclusion that everything is set for 2021 to become a great year for healthcare systems worldwide. Since the worldwide vaccine production is scaling up constantly and new vaccines are being developed, COVID-19 infection rates should decrease, and the pandemic might be contained. Not less importantly, an increasing number of patients worldwide will enjoy the benefit of having a surgery with MAGNEZIX® implants, and therefore also the spread of the long existing MRSA endemic in hospitals may be reduced. Doctors and medical institutions therefore, on the one hand, act in patients’ individual best interest when they recommend and use MAGNEZIX® implants, but on the other hand, in doing so they also act in their own best interest as well as in the interest of healthcare systems around the globe and society in general.

Read the original article on MedtechOutlook.

[1] Klevens RM, Edwards JR, Richards CL Jr, et al. Estimating health care-associated infections and deaths in U.S. hospitals, 2002. Public Health Rep. 2007;122(2):160-166. doi:10.1177/003335490712200205