Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Germ-Mania


When was the last time you saw a person in hospital garb outside of a hospital? At least in Chicago, chances are it was recently, maybe as recently as the last time you were on the train to work or in the grocery store. These are just ordinary people, employed in the medical profession, on their way to or from a shift. Just ordinary people going about their lives, participating in their environment and unintentionally bringing everything they’ve touched into the hospital with them.

One of my first jobs was working part-time at a sprawling, turn of the (20th) century hospital. Each shift, any worker who came in contact with patients, from surgeons to orderlies, stopped off at a locker room and changed from their street clothes into a pair of hospital issued scrubs. The scrubs themselves were forbidden to leave the premises and were laundered on-site. So, essentially everyone in the hospital wore work uniforms from a communal pool of tops and bottoms (best not to think about it), but it was generally ensured that each worker would walk onto the hospital floor in a freshly laundered, and extremely comfortable, set of clothes. Did budget pressures force hospitals to change this practice? Is the responsibility now on the employee to outfit themselves?

In other news, there have been a few thousand stories about the dreaded, drug-resistant, flesh-eating bacteria MRSA. [See here, here or here, if you haven’t already.] Doctors over-prescribing antibiotics has been blamed for creating these hard to treat strains of the Staphylococcus bacteria. But could other harmful germs also find their way into hospitals on the clothes of those treating the patients? It could be a coincidence, but if any of those workers happened to get to work on the Red Line, I’m fairly sure the seat they used was not entirely sterile.


Launch Pad Side Bar: For any with doubts about natural selection, take a closer look at how a few genetic mutations turns a problematic, but treatable, bacterial infection into a killer. It seems doubtful divine intervention is the cause.

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