Application of Nursing Care Using Deodorant and Antibacterial Fibers

Most of the elderly patients confined to bed suffer from the case of contracted hands and are unable to open their hands freely. Since they grasp the hands tightly all the time, the contracted hands generate foul smell like degraded aliphatic acid products and also cause the skin disease such as athlete's foot by Trichophyton. In the hospital, a rod-like tool made of soft fabric is conventionally applied to the palms of those patients to prevent from injuring the palm skin, but it does not help to suppress a foul smell generation due to an unhealthy condition of the skin. In order to solve this problem and improve the patient room environment, we applied a deodorant as well as antibacterial cotton fabric processed with iron (III) tetracarboxyphthalocyanine-processed and cupper (II) tetraammine. Iron (III) tetracarboxyphthalocyanine is known as an artificial oxidase-like enzyme, and cupper (II) tetraammine functions synergistically with this artificial enzyme to suppress foul smell and bacteria growth. The clinical test confirmed that foul smell from contracted hands was reduced to "very weak" by applying a hand grip made of new processed cotton fabrics after 4 days. The diseased skin (typically observed between fingers and palm) exhibited a symptom of recovery to its healthy sate after 3 or 4 days, and most of the athlete's foot symptom disappeared after 1 week.