Handwashing Effects on Hospital-Induced Illness
Each year, two million Americans leave hospitals with something they didn't arrive with: infections- everything from staph and strep to urinary tract infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, 20,000 to 30,000 people even die from these infections (15:27). Nosocomial infections have historically contributed to outbreaks of sickness and disease in hospitals. The landmark concepts of hygiene and antisepsis arose independently in the mid 1800s. Although others recognized and described the contagious nature of childbed fever, Ignaz Semmelweis, demonstrated conclusively that contaminated hands of medical attendants were spreading the disease and that this spread could be minimized with antiseptic hand cleansing.
At about the same time, Joseph Lister applied principles of antisepsis to wound care in an effort to change surgery from a last resort procedure which usually caused septic death to a comparatively safe practice. In yet another part of Europe, Florence Nightingale instigated radical changes in the management of hospitals for soldiers and dramatically reduced mortality from contagious disease among the soldiers in the Crimean War (14:92).
Handwashing was certainly not a new practice in health care; physicians had been recommending general hygiene and cleanliness for decades. The unique contributions of Semmelweis were his recognition that the viral agent was being directly transmitted from one individual to another on the hands, and the concept of one necessary cause for the disease. He did not attribute the disease to some nebulous miasma, to foul air, or to a general effluvium, but a specific circumstance that the hands became contaminated (18:171).
In 1849, Ignaz Semmelweis, an Hungarian obstetrician, joined the staff of the Vienna Lying in Hospital and noted a large discrepancy in death rates among women attended by midwives an...