On Washing Hands

One afternoon last December, I took a tour of my hospital with Deborah Yokoe, an infectious-disease specialist, and Susan Marino, a medical technologist by training. They work in our infection-control unit. Their full-time job is to stop the spread of infection in the hospital. They have coped with influenza epidemics, Legionnaires' disease, fatal bacterial meningitis, and once this past year, a case that, according to the patient's brain-biopsy results, might have been Creutzfeld–Jakob disease — a nightmare, because ordinary heat-sterilization of the neurosurgical instruments used would not have kept the infectious agent from being transferred to other patients. Yokoe and . . .