Maureen Dowd recommends giving doctors orders:
When my brother went into the hospital with pneumonia, he quickly contracted four other infections in the intensive care unit.
Anguished, I asked a young doctor why this was happening. Wearing a white lab coat and blue tie, he did a show-and-tell. He leaned over Michael and let his tie brush my sedated brother’s hospital gown.
“It could be anything,” he said. “It could be my tie spreading germs.”
I was dumbfounded. “Then why do you wear a tie?” I asked. He shrugged and left for rounds.
Michael died in that I.C.U. A couple years later, I read reports about how neckties and lab coats worn by doctors and clinical workers were suspected as carriers of deadly germs. Infections kill 100,000 patients in hospitals and other clinics in the U.S. every year.
A 2004 study of New York City doctors and clinicians discovered that their ties were contagious with at least one type of infectious microbe. Four years ago, the British National health system initiated a “bare below the elbow” dress code barring ties, lab coats, jewelry on the hands and wrists, and long fingernails.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that health care workers, even doctors and nurses, have a “poor” record of obeying hand-washing rules.
A report in the April issue of Health Affairs indicated that one out of every three people suffer a mistake during a hospital stay.
I saw infractions of the rules in the I.C.U. where Michael died, but I never called out anyone. I was too busy trying to ingratiate myself with the doctors, nurses and orderlies, irrationally hoping that they’d treat my brother better if they liked us.
Ah, yes [the British National health system] did initiate [a “bare below the elbow” dress] code, but Islamic female nurses are exempt from these rules because their religion forbids them showing their underarms. The fact that people are dying because of poor hygiene is less important than the religious feelings of these fanatics. But we already knew that, didn’t we?
I suppose we can take solace in the fact that there are probably very few fundamentalist Islamic female nurses.