R
Raymond
Guest
The Disturbing Truth About Doctors and Your Medical Safety
By Atul Gawande, AlterNet. Posted May 18, 2007.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, two million
Americans acquire an infection while they are in the hospital. Ninety
thousand die of that infection. .
One ordinary December day, I took a tour of my hospital with Deborah
Yokoe, an infectious disease specialist, and Susan Marino, a
microbiologist. They work in our hospital's infection-control unit.
Their full-time job, and that of three others in the unit, is to stop
the spread of infection in the hospital. This is not flashy work, and
they are not flashy people. Yokoe is forty-five years old, gentle
voiced, and dimpled. She wears sneakers at work. Marino is in her
fifties and reserved by nature. But they have coped with influenza
epidemics, Legionnaires' disease, fatal bacterial meningitis, and,
just a few months before, a case that, according to the patient's
brain-biopsy results, might have been Creutzfeld-Jakob disease -- a
nightmare, not only because it is incurable and fatal but also because
the infectious agent that causes it, known as a prion, cannot be
killed by usual heat-sterilization procedures
By the time the results came back, the neurosurgeon's brain-biopsy
instruments might have transferred the disease to other patients, but
infection-control team members tracked the instruments down in time
and had them chemically sterilized. Yokoe and Marino have seen
measles, the plague, and rabbit fever (which is caused by a bacterium
that is extraordinarily contagious in hospital laboratories and feared
as a bioterrorist weapon). They once instigated a nationwide recall of
frozen strawberries, having traced a hepatitis A outbreak to a batch
served at an ice cream social. Recently at large in the hospital, they
told me, have been a rotavirus, a Norwalk virus, several strains of
Pseudomonas bacteria, a superresistant Klebsiella, and the ubiquitous
scourges of modern hospitals -- resistant Staphylococcus aureus and
Enterococcus faecalis, which are a frequent cause of pneumonias, wound
infections, and bloodstream infections.
Each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, two
million Americans acquire an infection while they are in the hospital.
Ninety thousand die of that infection. The hardest part of the
infection-control team's job, Yokoe says, is not coping with the
variety of contagions they encounter or the panic that sometimes
occurs among patients and staff. Instead, their greatest difficulty is
getting clinicians like me to do the one thing that consistently halts
the spread of infections: wash our hands
Cont'd
SEE:
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/51949/
By Atul Gawande, AlterNet. Posted May 18, 2007.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, two million
Americans acquire an infection while they are in the hospital. Ninety
thousand die of that infection. .
One ordinary December day, I took a tour of my hospital with Deborah
Yokoe, an infectious disease specialist, and Susan Marino, a
microbiologist. They work in our hospital's infection-control unit.
Their full-time job, and that of three others in the unit, is to stop
the spread of infection in the hospital. This is not flashy work, and
they are not flashy people. Yokoe is forty-five years old, gentle
voiced, and dimpled. She wears sneakers at work. Marino is in her
fifties and reserved by nature. But they have coped with influenza
epidemics, Legionnaires' disease, fatal bacterial meningitis, and,
just a few months before, a case that, according to the patient's
brain-biopsy results, might have been Creutzfeld-Jakob disease -- a
nightmare, not only because it is incurable and fatal but also because
the infectious agent that causes it, known as a prion, cannot be
killed by usual heat-sterilization procedures
By the time the results came back, the neurosurgeon's brain-biopsy
instruments might have transferred the disease to other patients, but
infection-control team members tracked the instruments down in time
and had them chemically sterilized. Yokoe and Marino have seen
measles, the plague, and rabbit fever (which is caused by a bacterium
that is extraordinarily contagious in hospital laboratories and feared
as a bioterrorist weapon). They once instigated a nationwide recall of
frozen strawberries, having traced a hepatitis A outbreak to a batch
served at an ice cream social. Recently at large in the hospital, they
told me, have been a rotavirus, a Norwalk virus, several strains of
Pseudomonas bacteria, a superresistant Klebsiella, and the ubiquitous
scourges of modern hospitals -- resistant Staphylococcus aureus and
Enterococcus faecalis, which are a frequent cause of pneumonias, wound
infections, and bloodstream infections.
Each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, two
million Americans acquire an infection while they are in the hospital.
Ninety thousand die of that infection. The hardest part of the
infection-control team's job, Yokoe says, is not coping with the
variety of contagions they encounter or the panic that sometimes
occurs among patients and staff. Instead, their greatest difficulty is
getting clinicians like me to do the one thing that consistently halts
the spread of infections: wash our hands
Cont'd
SEE:
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/51949/
