View Full Version : Proper use of Purell -- check the category this is in, please.
Amigi'sLastStand
09-08-2006, 15:27
Some ppl have tried to post what they thought were helpful threads lately, only to be attacked relentlessly but fellow WBers. So, I am hesitant to even write this one, but here goes.... I really dont feel like getting into a pissing contest with anyone over this.
I did a day hike yesterday, took my laptop with me, my daypack, stove, a nice steak, potatooes, etc. and hiked up the FT.
When I got to where I wa going to have lunch, there was a family of four picnicing(?). We exchanged our helloes, and I went about making my meal.
I noticed that the kids hands were filthy, as were the parents, but they were just cooking and eating away, so I offered up my Purell to them.
I got that "Are you judging us" look, so I just tossed out a little thing about rotovirus, hanta, dysentery, etc. not so much in a shock ( as Slogger likes to say ) but in a more seasoned and informative tone. They accepted it, and took the Purell.
Maybe they were trying to be kind, but they used about a dime size dollop, wiped their palms together, and then wiped their hands on their pants.:rolleyes:
But this scene reminded me of how often I see ppl on trails do the exact same thing, so.....
Purell works by the alcohol killing off any surface nasties, then as in dries, the copolymer dries over your skin like a thin plastic glove for added protection.
Nothing beats soap and water, but as we all know, that is hard to come by out in the woods when packing light. So just be sure you use it properly. Lots of threads lately about water filtration, disease, and sanitation. Lots of ppl have pointed out that its may not be so much the water source getting ppl sick as bad hygiene. I mostly agree with that.
So, before you eat, or after going to the bathroom use liberal amount of hand sanitizer, massage it around your entire hand, then let it air dry. You are now good to go. Dont wipe your hands on your pants, or only clean your palms, or smoke a cig or dube while doing this!
Stay safe.
Frolicking Dinosaurs
09-08-2006, 15:34
or smoke a cig or dube while doing this!LMAO
Good advice.
VictoriaM
09-08-2006, 16:20
Also, hand santizers are not meant to clean dirt or other organic material off your skin. If your hands are visibly dirty, wash them in water first to get the dirt off (doesn't have to be treated water) then use the sanitizer. A dime- to quarter-size drop is fine as long as you can cover your whole hand with it.
I take extremely good care of my hands cause I wear contacts. When I take them out at night I go through a thurow cleansing process. Have gotten eye infections before, never on the trail, they aren't fun especially when you wake up in the morning to puss that has sealed your eye shut. I did an over nighter this past march and a day after I got back both eyes were mildly infected. It was cold and rainy when setting up camp and I had been whiping my runny nose with my hand all day while hiking. Didn't clean them good enough, took out my contacts and the rest is history.
Lies! All LIES!
Bacteria have already begun to build resistances to our anti-bacterial compounds. By using Purell and other sanitizers you're only contributing to this process. You cleanliness freaks are actually helping to create super-bugs that will infect us traditionalist "dirty" people. I will curse you from my deathbed when I have Arboreal Necrotizing Assitis. In the end we're all doomed!
Frolicking Dinosaurs
09-08-2006, 17:13
Calm down, Newb. Your way more likely to poop yourself to death due to E. Coli in the woods than to die from Arboreal Necrotizing Fasciitis because " (http://www.nnff.org/nnff_what.htm) In order for someone to contract NF, the bacteria must be introduced into the body. This occurs either from direct contact with someone carrying the bacteria, or because of the bacteria being carried by the person him or herself." (http://www.nnff.org/nnff_what.htm)
:-? this thread was started by a guy with his finger up his nose :p
Calm down, Newb. Your way more likely to poop yourself to death due to E. Coli in the woods than to die from Arboreal Necrotizing Fasciitis because " (http://www.nnff.org/nnff_what.htm) In order for someone to contract NF, the bacteria must be introduced into the body. This occurs either from direct contact with someone carrying the bacteria, or because of the bacteria being carried by the person him or herself." (http://www.nnff.org/nnff_what.htm)
umm...I said Arboreal Necrotizing Assitis, not Fascitis. It's very similar to the dreaded Simian Buttcrackius Inflammamatus, but with deadly consequences. Fascitis is a different boat entirely.
Amigi'sLastStand
09-08-2006, 17:26
:-? this thread was started by a guy with his finger up his nose :p
But it's a Purelled finger!:D
:-? this thread was started by a guy with his finger up his nose :p
LMAO....... :banana :D
But it's a Purelled finger!:D
"The Doctor said I wouldn't have so many nose bleeds if I kept my finger out of there."
It's much easier to just quit cleaning your house and hands and stop taking showers six months prior to your hiking. Build up a resistance.
:D :D ... :eek:
Just Jeff
09-08-2006, 17:45
umm...I said Arboreal Necrotizing Assitis, not Fascitis. It's very similar to the dreaded Simian Buttcrackius Inflammamatus, but with deadly consequences. Fascitis is a different boat entirely.
Yep. And waking up to find that pus has sealed up your crack is even worse than losing an eye. Careful out there.
And at least Amigi's finger wasn't up someone else's nose, Purelled or snot.
Footslogger
09-08-2006, 17:50
You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose ...but you can't pick your friend's nose !!
Did someone say DOOBIE ??
'Slogger
Brrrb Oregon
09-08-2006, 17:55
Lies! All LIES!
Bacteria have already begun to build resistances to our anti-bacterial compounds. By using Purell and other sanitizers you're only contributing to this process. You cleanliness freaks are actually helping to create super-bugs that will infect us traditionalist "dirty" people. I will curse you from my deathbed when I have Arboreal Necrotizing Assitis. In the end we're all doomed!
Not quite.
Purell and waterless cleansers are not in the same chemical class as "antimicrobial" soaps.
Purell works by putting alcohol on your hand in a gel form. This is not something that microbiologists are concerned that bacteria will evolve resistance to. As already noted, however, it does not have the effectiveness one might hope when the hands are visibly coated in dirt. Purell won't hurt anything, but it won't make a manure-covered hand fit for work in the food service industry, either. The safest measures are to get as much visible filth off as possible, then use the Purell.
Antimicrobial soaps are another matter. Those contain compounds aimed more directly at bacteria. There have been some concern about those, but that is a topic for another thread.
At any rate, be careful who you curse. Sometimes you don't get the whole story, not even on your deathbed. But bless you for putting the common good over your own desire to avoid diarrhea. That's the spirit.
Just Jeff
09-08-2006, 17:57
Lies! All LIES!
Hrm...guess I better tell those pesky doctors to quit sanitizing w/ alcohol.
hikerjohnd
09-08-2006, 17:59
didn't someone say you have to eat a pound of dirt before you die?
Just Jeff
09-08-2006, 18:04
Never heard that before. I'd guess it depends on what's in the first bite!
But even so, go eat a half pound of dirt and let us know how you feel.:D
Brrrb Oregon
09-08-2006, 18:05
didn't someone say you have to eat a pound of dirt before you die?
My kids got that before preschool, with no signs of stopping.
When they were babies, they used to go trolling for little bits of food on the floor that the broom missed. We used to call the food bits "floor d'oeuvres".
If eating dirt is good for you, those kids might live forever. I don't quibble over the ten-second rule, but I still make them wash their hands before they eat. It's a mom thing.
atraildreamer
09-09-2006, 07:42
Has anyone seen my kid Ralphie? :confused: He's been hanging around with a undesirable crowd called the "Whiteblaze Gang". :eek: I don't know what he calls himself, but he is easy to recognize...he always has a finger up his nose!
Chief Wiggums
http://www.newszapforums.com/images/avatars/272.jpg
StarLyte
09-09-2006, 08:45
Has anyone seen my kid Ralphie? :confused: He's been hanging around with a undesirable crowd called the "Whiteblaze Gang". :eek: I don't know what he calls himself, but he is easy to recognize...he always has a finger up his nose!
Chief Wiggums
http://www.newszapforums.com/images/avatars/272.jpg
That's your kid eh?
He seems like a pretty nice guy :D
Frolicking Dinosaurs
09-09-2006, 08:58
I had no idea Amigi was atraildreamer's love child. The things you learn on WB. ;)
As for eating dirt - I think most children that aren't supervised to the point of over-protection likely meet their pound quota before they leave their preschool years. Kids are curious about the characteristics of their environment and one of the senses is taste. They pretty much taste everything new they run across before they are about age three and will continue this behavior on a more limited basis up to age five or six .... so they will likely ingest a pound before their school years.
Just in case someone comes to this thread in the future and sees that eating dirt is normal in kids, excessive eating of dirt by a child for more than a month can be a sign of illness (http://www.kidshealth.org/parent/emotions/behavior/pica.html).
When I got to where I wa going to have lunch, there was a family of four picnicing(?). We exchanged our helloes, and I went about making my meal.
I noticed that the kids hands were filthy, as were the parents, but they were just cooking and eating away, so I offered up my Purell to them.
I got that "Are you judging us" look, so I just tossed out a little thing about rotovirus, hanta, dysentery, etc. not so much in a shock ( as Slogger likes to say ) but in a more seasoned and informative tone. They accepted it, and took the Purell.
Rule #1: Never tell someone else how to raise their kids. Hence, the looks.
Regarding Purell & hanatavirus - that's a stretch. The way to avoid hantavirus (which is rare) is to control rodents around your home, or minimize contact with rodent droppings. The same folks who would use Purell to fight hantavirus probably wouldn't think twice about vigorously sweeping out a shelter - and how that might affect the respiratory system.
StarLyte
09-09-2006, 09:12
I suppose I'd better bleach my hands first before I fry up that German bologna at the Gathering then....and especially before I put it on the fresh baked pumperknickel bread.....guess I better ship one to FD :rolleyes: I wonder what line would be longer, mine or Walkin'Home cause he'll have lobster. Damn him.
SGT Rock
09-09-2006, 09:15
Aww.. Pffft...
Kids eat dirt. It's good for 'em too. Why when I was growing up we had to eat it. They served it in the school cafeterias. And we were thankful just to have something to eat.
Amigi'sLastStand
09-09-2006, 09:18
Rule #1: Never tell someone else how to raise their kids. Hence, the looks.
Regarding Purell & hanatavirus - that's a stretch. The way to avoid hantavirus (which is rare) is to control rodents around your home, or minimize contact with rodent droppings. The same folks who would use Purell to fight hantavirus probably wouldn't think twice about vigorously sweeping out a shelter - and how that might affect the respiratory system.
Really, didnt know that.:rolleyes:
:-? Wasnt trying to tell them how to raise their kids, just that they looked like city folk, who decided to go to a little park and have a lunch. The kind of ppl that think half a bottle of charcoal lighter fluid should just be enough....
And hanta, my friend, is not stretch at all in my neck of the woods. The picnic/camping site we were at had bleachers for the raccons, mice, and possums to cheer for their favorite teams, like yankees who dont know how to cook in the outdoors, and leave food scrap all over the place.:D
GO METS!!!!! ( shh, dont tell my fellow southerners )
And Mowgli, update your daughters thread, man. Havent heard anything in while. How she doing?
Onto another thought in this thread. Yes, I am attraildreamers love child. Ya'll know now, the cats out of the bag, or finger's out of the nose.....
Amigi'sLastStand
09-09-2006, 09:21
Aww.. Pffft...
Kids eat dirt. It's good for 'em too. Why when I was growing up we had to eat it. They served it in the school cafeterias. And we were thankful just to have something to eat.
AND WE WERE THANKFUL! -- Bill Cosby
Right up there with Eddie Murphy "Delirious" as one of thee greatest standup routines in history.
SGT Rock
09-09-2006, 09:34
Well I was thinking of the Monty Python skit: Four Yorkshiremen
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: You're right there, Obadiah.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: A cup o' cold tea.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Without milk or sugar.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Or tea.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: In a cracked cup, an' all.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son".
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, 'e was right.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, 'e was.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a lake.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you. ALL: They won't!
Actually, eating your boogers is actually a good thing for you digestive tract/resistance to bacteria. Poo poo me if you will, but it helps you build anitbodies.
Brrrb Oregon
09-09-2006, 23:55
Has anyone seen my kid Ralphie? :confused: He's been hanging around with a undesirable crowd called the "Whiteblaze Gang". :eek: I don't know what he calls himself, but he is easy to recognize...he always has a finger up his nose!
Chief Wiggums
http://www.newszapforums.com/images/avatars/272.jpg
Well, thanks....that really narrows it down! :D
atraildreamer
09-24-2006, 06:59
Well, thanks....that really narrows it down! :D
“Rhinotillexomania is a recent term coined to describe compulsive nose picking”, according to Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India. They launched a probe into the nose-picking behavior of 200 adolescents and came to the conclusion that “Nose picking is common in adolescents. It is often associated with other habitual behaviors. Nose picking may merit closer epidemiologic and nosologic scrutiny.” For their paper entitled "A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample," published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, June 2001, they received the IgNoble Medicine award. :banana
http://cactus.eas.asu.edu/partha/Columns/2002/04-08-ignoble.htm
Tamarack
09-24-2006, 10:43
Also, hand santizers are not meant to clean dirt or other organic material off your skin.
Yup, yuky thought. Purell only kills the germs on your hands and leaves all thier little carcases all over your hands. EEWWWW. well at least they're dead carcases and not live ones.
I have used purell to clean cuts after a good washing with water. It works alright till you can get to some soap. Also good for drying out those damp areas where chaffing is.
Aww.. Pffft...
Kids eat dirt. It's good for 'em too. Why when I was growing up we had to eat it. They served it in the school cafeterias. And we were thankful just to have something to eat.
I went to a school like that. Only after walking five miles each day in a raging blizzard, (uphill both ways) we had to dig through the snow to the frozen earth for our lunches, before cutting the wood needed to warm the classrooms and heat our lunch, fighting off hungry wolves and bears all the while.
SGT Rock
09-24-2006, 13:51
And I bet you were grateful for it too.
atraildreamer
09-24-2006, 20:27
I went to a school like that. Only after walking five miles each day in a raging blizzard, (uphill both ways) we had to dig through the snow to the frozen earth for our lunches, before cutting the wood needed to warm the classrooms and heat our lunch, fighting off hungry wolves and bears all the while.
In Florida ! :)
Brrrb Oregon
09-24-2006, 21:08
I went to a school like that. Only after walking five miles each day in a raging blizzard, (uphill both ways) we had to dig through the snow to the frozen earth for our lunches, before cutting the wood needed to warm the classrooms and heat our lunch, fighting off hungry wolves and bears all the while.
Which explains why to this day you don't so much as take a bus without a map, a compass, warm clothes, water, and some food. No wonder you never complained.
Purell is 62 percent alcohol so it is very flameable, any hand sanitizer needs to be over 60 percent to work. if you dont want to keep your hands clean i have some bag spinach from California you can have
I went to a school like that. Only after walking five miles each day in a raging blizzard, (uphill both ways) we had to dig through the snow to the frozen earth for our lunches, before cutting the wood needed to warm the classrooms and heat our lunch, fighting off hungry wolves and bears all the while.
After years of regaling my kids with the tales of how we used to have to walk five miles to school, and five miles home, uphill both ways, in snow, with my sister on my shoulders, last week one gave me a birthday card that read something like, "Here's celebrating the day you walked eight miles to be born." I loved it.
orangebug
09-25-2006, 07:31
This article was on a medical listserv a couple days ago. You might enjoy. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/magazine/24wwln_freak.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all
September 24, 2006
Freakonomics
Selling Soap
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
The Petri-Dish Screen Saver
Leon Bender is a 68-year-old urologist in Los Angeles. Last year, during a South Seas cruise with his wife, Bender noticed something interesting: passengers who went ashore weren’t allowed to reboard the ship until they had some Purell squirted on their hands. The crew even dispensed Purell to passengers lined up at the buffet tables. Was it possible, Bender wondered, that a cruise ship was more diligent about killing germs than his own hospital?
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where Bender has been practicing for 37 years, is in fact an excellent hospital. But even excellent hospitals often pass along bacterial infections, thereby sickening or even killing the very people they aim to heal. In its 2000 report “To Err Is Human,” the Institute of Medicine estimated that anywhere from 44,000 to 98,000 Americans die each year because of hospital errors — more deaths than from either motor-vehicle crashes or breast cancer — and that one of the leading errors was the spread of bacterial infections.
While it is now well established that germs cause illness, this wasn’t always known to be true. In 1847, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was working in a Viennese maternity hospital with two separate clinics. In one clinic, babies were delivered by physicians; in the other, by midwives. The mortality rate in the doctors’ clinic was nearly triple the rate in the midwives’ clinic. Why the huge discrepancy? The doctors, it turned out, often came to deliveries straight from the autopsy ward, promptly infecting mother and child with whatever germs their most recent cadaver happened to carry. Once Semmelweis had these doctors wash their hands with an antiseptic solution, the mortality rate plummeted.
But Semmelweis’s mandate, as crucial and obvious as it now seems, has proved devilishly hard to enforce. A multitude of medical studies have shown that hospital personnel wash or disinfect their hands in fewer than half the instances they should. And doctors are the worst offenders, more lax than either nurses or aides.
All of this was on Bender’s mind when he got home from his cruise. As a former chief of staff at Cedars-Sinai, he felt inspired to help improve his colleagues’ behavior. Just as important, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations would soon be inspecting Cedars-Sinai, and it simply wouldn’t do for a world-class hospital to get failing marks because its doctors didn’t always wash their hands.
It may seem a mystery why doctors, of all people, practice poor hand hygiene. But as Bender huddled with the hospital’s leadership, they identified a number of reasons. For starters, doctors are very busy. And a sink isn’t always handy — often it is situated far out of a doctor’s work flow or is barricaded by equipment. Many hospitals, including Cedars-Sinai, had already introduced alcohol-based disinfectants like Purell as an alternative to regular hand-washing. But even with Purell dispensers mounted on a wall, the Cedars-Sinai doctors didn’t always use them.
There also seem to be psychological reasons for noncompliance. The first is what might be called a perception deficit. In one Australian medical study, doctors self-reported their hand-washing rate at 73 percent, whereas when these same doctors were observed, their actual rate was a paltry 9 percent. The second psychological reason, according to one Cedars-Sinai doctor, is arrogance. “The ego can kick in after you have been in practice a while,” explains Paul Silka, an emergency-department physician who is also the hospital’s chief of staff. “You say: ‘Hey, I couldn’t be carrying the bad bugs. It’s the other hospital personnel.”’ Furthermore, most of the doctors at Cedars-Sinai are free agents who work for themselves, not for the hospital, and many of them saw the looming Joint Commission review as a nuisance. Their incentives, in other words, were not quite aligned with the hospital’s.
So the hospital needed to devise some kind of incentive scheme that would increase compliance without alienating its doctors. In the beginning, the administrators gently cajoled the doctors with e-mail, faxes and posters. But none of that seemed to work. (The hospital had enlisted a crew of nurses to surreptitiously report on the staff’s hand-washing.) “Then we started a campaign that really took the word to the physicians where they live, which is on the wards,” Silka recalls. “And, most importantly, in the physicians’ parking lot, which in L.A. is a big deal.”
For the next six weeks, Silka and roughly a dozen other senior personnel manned the parking-lot entrance, handing out bottles of Purell to the arriving doctors. They started a Hand Hygiene Safety Posse that roamed the wards and let it be known that this posse preferred using carrots to sticks: rather than searching for doctors who weren’t compliant, they’d try to “catch” a doctor who was washing up, giving him a $10 Starbucks card as reward. You might think that the highest earners in a hospital wouldn’t much care about a $10 incentive — “but none of them turned down the card,” Silka says.
When the nurse spies reported back the latest data, it was clear that the hospital’s efforts were working — but not nearly enough. Compliance had risen to about 80 percent from 65 percent, but the Joint Commission required 90 percent compliance.
These results were delivered to the hospital’s leadership by Rekha Murthy, the hospital’s epidemiologist, during a meeting of the Chief of Staff Advisory Committee. The committee’s roughly 20 members, mostly top doctors, were openly discouraged by Murthy’s report. Then, after they finished their lunch, Murthy handed each of them an agar plate — a sterile petri dish loaded with a spongy layer of agar. “I would love to culture your hand,” she told them.
They pressed their palms into the plates, and Murthy sent them to the lab to be cultured and photographed. The resulting images, Silka says, “were disgusting and striking, with gobs of colonies of bacteria.”
The administration then decided to harness the power of such a disgusting image. One photograph was made into a screen saver that haunted every computer in Cedars-Sinai. Whatever reasons the doctors may have had for not complying in the past, they vanished in the face of such vivid evidence. “With people who have been in practice 25 or 30 or 40 years, it’s hard to change their behavior,” Leon Bender says. “But when you present them with good data, they change their behavior very rapidly.” Some forms of data, of course, are more compelling than others, and in this case an image was worth 1,000 statistical tables. Hand-hygiene compliance shot up to nearly 100 percent and, according to the hospital, it has pretty much remained there ever since.
Cedars-Sinai’s clever application of incentives is certainly encouraging to anyone who opposes the wanton proliferation of bacterial infections. But it also highlights how much effort can be required to solve a simple problem — and, in this case, the problem is but one of many. Craig Feied, a physician and technologist in Washington who is designing a federally financed “hospital of the future,” says that hand hygiene, while important, will never be sufficient to stop the spread of bacteria. That’s why he is working with a technology company that infuses hospital equipment with silver ion particles, which serve as an antimicrobial shield. Microbes can thrive on just about any surface in a hospital room, Feied notes, citing an old National Institutes of Health campaign to promote hand-washing in pediatric wards. The campaign used a stuffed teddy bear, called T. Bear, as a promotional giveaway. Kids and doctors alike apparently loved T. Bear — but they weren’t the only ones. When, after a week, a few dozen T. Bears were pulled from the wards to be cultured, every one of them was found to have acquired a host of new friends: Staphylococcus aureus, E. coli, Pseudomonas, Klebsiella.. . .
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.” More information on the research behind this column is at www.freakonomics.com.
Gray Blazer
09-25-2006, 11:28
How dare you Yankees tell us Floridiots our hands are dirty. You didn't want a pissing contest, but, now you got one on your hands and no amount of purell is gonna wash it off!
Gray Blazer
09-25-2006, 11:31
Aww.. Pffft...
Kids eat dirt. It's good for 'em too. Why when I was growing up we had to eat it. They served it in the school cafeterias. And we were thankful just to have something to eat.
You got to eat?!?
Brrrb Oregon
09-25-2006, 12:44
How dare you Yankees tell us Floridiots our hands are dirty. You didn't want a pissing contest, but, now you got one on your hands and no amount of purell is gonna wash it off!
Sir, if you say there is no dirt, there is no dirt, sir. Your hands are a credit to your fine state....whose soil, I might add, I would be priveleged and honored to have on my hands for any meal, I can assure you, sir.
You are absolutely right, sir...no amount of Purell will remove dirt.
Now, sir, if your would, please put down that gallon of bleach and back away slowly, sir.