Superbugs Breeding in Hospitals
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Hospitals seeking to keep patients from picking up infections should focus as much on cleaning up invisible germs as on removing the visible dirt, a British doctor argued on Tuesday.
Clean hands can only go so far in protecting patients from infection if doorknobs, bed rails and even sheets are covered with bacteria and viruses, Dr. Stephanie Dancer of South General Hospital in Glasgow writes in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
But other infection experts differed on whether clean equipment and telephones affect a patient’s biggest risk of acquiring a “superbug” such as methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

