Bare hands kill

Link: Hospital hazards.

Hospital rooms and corridors may look clean to the human eye, but they could be crawling with dangerous bacteria. It happens that a patient goes in for a minor procedure and then ends up for a much longer stay after developing a terrible infection. Health professionals believe that at least 250,000 patients a year develop infections in Canadian hospitals, of whom 8,000 die. The New York Times last week interviewed a woman whose 63-year-old mother went to a Manhattan hospital for a shoulder wound, where she was treated by a doctor who changed her dressings using his bare hands. The patient contracted the virulent bug methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, and died.