MRAB was not recovered from any of the environmental
samples obtained in August and September 2009. Routine
decontamination of the hospital environment was performed,
but this did not result in termination of the outbreak. In
December 2009, after standard methods had failed, it was
decided to close the affected ICUs temporarily. The patients
were transferred to other departments following isolation
guidelines. A series of educational training sessions was held
for staff. The environmental cleaning and decontaminating
procedures were also changed to include daily cleaning of all
equipment with a hypochlorite-based agent. Both ICUs were
decontaminated using the Steris VHP system on 20 December
2009.