Free Republic

Going into a hospital? It's getting riskier because of drug-resistant infections -- the kind almost no drug can cure. Despite one federal government "action plan" after another, the germs are winning. Government authorities are clueless about how many infections there are, or how many patients are dying. Alarming new research shows that one of the deadliest families of bugs, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, nicknamed CRE, may actually be striking three times more patients than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us. One lesson from the war against AIDS: Level with the public about the enormity of a problem if you...

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is replacing its new high-tech, electric-eye faucets with the old-fashioned kind after discovering that the new hands-free designs actually allowed more contamination from Legionella and other bacteria than the old style. Although the high-tech faucets cut daily water consumption by well over half, Johns Hopkins researchers identified Legionella growing in 50 percent of cultured water samples from 20 electronic-eye faucets in or near patient rooms on three different inpatient units, but in only 15 percent of water cultures from. . . . ."