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Comment by jkot | Hacker News Reader

> Hospital hygiene is another focus; there is some evidence that staff are more careless about cleanliness than they were in pre-antibiotic days, when they saw deaths like Albert Alexander’s on a more regular basis.

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I spent a month at one of the top US hospitals and I witnessed crazy unhygienic practices. The most common one is when the nurse assistant puts on gloves to clean the toilet and other items touched by bodily fluids and then proceeds to clean the food tray with the same gloves and often even adjust the IV lines. I got a lot of nurses angry by pointing this out (it must suck to hear someone else tell you that you're doing your job badly, but still). My mother caught a C diff infection. After that, I carried a clorhexidine bottle with me to the hospital and cleaned all surfaces that contacted food with it.

Hospital-acquired infections have become incredibly common. My grandmother caught a C diff infection after what had already been a very arduous treatment and recovery, and she received basically no support from the hospital that had effectively given her the infection.

While she likely got it in the hospital, it should be noted that a fair portion of the population carried C. difficile in their guts, and could develop a symptomatic infection purely as the result of a disruption of the less hardy elements of their gut flora.

I wouldn't say the staff (as in, doctors and nurses) are careless. It's just that in many hospitals the state hasn't been paying for cleaning services.

There have been multiple instances of rats being found in hospitals, for example.

Here's a source from a few months back. This one was in the pediatric ICU!

http://rederecord.r7.com/video/rato-e-encontrado-em-uti-do-h...

There's a great book called "The Checklist Manifesto" which talks about how simple checklists (of well known, basic best practices) can radically improve medical outcomes.

Seems like cleanliness should be on that type of checklist.

Some modeling work I've done suggests that transmission of hospital infections is possible even at fairly high levels of hand hygiene and no systematic bad actors.

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