From USA TODAY:
…about one out of every 20 hospitalized patients will acquire an infection there, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly 100,000 die each year from these infections; that number has leveled off after 15 or 20 years of rising. A 2009 CDC report estimated that hospital costs for treating infections spread in health-care settings was up to $45 billion a year.
Bacteria that cause infections are ubiquitous in hospitals. They might not sicken healthy people, but patients are at higher risk. Their immune systems might be weakened, or, like Stout-Robinson, they might have an incision or a catheter that breaches the skin, the body’s first line of defense against infection.
More than 60% of doctors’ and nurses’ uniforms tested at a hospital harbored potentially dangerous bacteria, reports an Israeli study published Aug. 31. And Cleveland researchers found that health-care workers’ gloved hands were just as apt to become contaminated with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, after touching infected patients’ call buttons as after touching their abdomens…
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