Beware of hospitals

Yesterday, I saw a program on CBC about infections in hospitals. You can see it here. It was a scary eye opener. In Canada, 8,000 people a year die from infections they picked up in the hospital. That’s as many as die from AIDS, car accidents and breast cancer, combined. They estimate that if hospital workers washed their hands as often as they should, that 30 to 50 percent of those deaths would be prevented. Healthcare workers usually only wash their hands between 5 and 30 per cent of the time, and doctors are the worst offenders. If you go to the hospital for treatment you have a one in nine chance of catching an infection while you are there. If you have to go, the best recommendation is to make sure you have hand cleanser in your room, and ask everybody that comes in to use it.