Egobation
I am now going to engage in egobation. It is the opposite of what you do to yourself alone which is of course, the opposite of sex. You may have noticed a period of time where I seemed to stop writing.
Actually, I didn’t stop writing, I just stopped writing here. I was working on a chapter for a book. My chapter is on sterilization, disinfection and antisepsis. It now resides with my editor. I keep reading it over and over. At times saying, hmmm this is good and engaging in egobation and at other times berating myself that it could be more scholarly. But my aim was that the information was simply put and was easily read and hopefully applied.
I don’t think I can post the chapter here, as I think my publisher will hold the copyright, but here are a couple of gems I came across in my research. One of the things we know about the prevention of disease is proper handwashing. Widmer compiled statistics from various sources and looked at compliance rates in handwashing. Below are the rates of compliance for various venues.
• ICU (intensive care unit): 9-41%;
• Ward/ICU: 32-48%;
• Pediatric 37%;
• Surgical ICU 38%
• All ICUs 32%.
Scary, less than half the people in serious places like intensive care units properly wash their hands.
Widmer, A. F. Replace Hand washing with the use of a Waterless Alcohol Rub? Clin. Infect. Dis. 31:136-43. 2000.
The other thing to get back on my rant with nosiocomial infections in hospitals, some computer models were run. The found two simple things could decrease the rate nosiocomial infection. Not surprisingly they were (drum roll please): 1) Increase in handwashing (particularly among visitors) and 2) decrease in the number of patients each nurse had to care for. One also advocated for pre-screening all patients for MRSA.
Raboud, J. Saskin, R. Sior, A. Loeb, M. Green, K., Low, D. E. and McGeer, A. Modeling transmission of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus among patients admitted to a hospital. 2005. Infect. Control Hosp. Epidemiol. 26(7):607-615
Cooper, B.S., Medlye, G. F. and Scott, G. M. Preliminary analysis of the transmission dynamics of nosocomial infections: stochastic and management effects. 1999. J. Hosp. Infect. 43(2):131-147. 1999.
Food for thought, none-the-less. Some of our biggest problems may have some very simple answers.