Have you heard of people walking into hospitals or health care service units to treat very ordinary ailments, but walk out with dangerous pathogens that may sometimes even cost them their lives?  How is it possible at a time when sanitation protocols are strictly adhered to in all hospitals?  How are Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI), or nosocomial infections, proving so destructive and claiming hundreds of lives across the world daily?

In the US alone, over 100,000 people die annually owing to HAI. Is it not a heavy price to pay for the people for no fault of their own? Careful use of antibiotics was once considered instrumental to prevent the spread of HAI, but today gram-negative germs, in particular, are resistant to almost all modern antibiotics and they are spreading quickly all over the world like forest fires. Be it MRSA, gram-positive bacteria or helicobacter, which is gram-negative, all of these pathogens can cause severe pneumonia and urinary tract infections. The germs threaten the patients once the latter's immune systems become weak and enter the body through wounds, catheters, or ventilators.

Most people would be really shocked and surprised to know that the failure to follow a very simple procedure called hand washing is the root cause of HAI. Most people may claim that all the hospitals strictly practice hand washing, but many people are not aware that the process itself is done in an incorrect and ineffective manner. After all, hand washing has been accepted to be the single most important procedure to check the spread of nosocomial infections. It is therefore imperative to ensure that the hospital staff resorts to hand washing before and after attending to a patient and after every contact with blood, body fluids, or secretions of the patients.

Use of hand washing signs and simple methods like ‘Henry the Hand’ can really help in controlling HAI from spreading in health care service centers, where a lot of visitors move around daily. It is also important that the visitors follow the similar set of procedures to support the hospital staff. Those who believe that wearing of gloves is an ideal method to substitute hand washing are thoroughly mistaken as even small defects in the gloves can result in contamination, thus allowing germs to spread freely. Finally, it appears a fresh round of awareness on hand washing is quite essential to fight against hospital infections in a concerted manner.