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Comment by Naijoko | Hacker News Reader

"99,000 americans a year die from hospital acquired infections that are entirely preventable using procedures and operations (not surgeries) that are known and evidentially proven. It's just really hard to get all of the parts of the orchestra to play the same tune so those people die needlessly."

??? I dont get this. The problem are Antibiotic resistant bacteria. You go to a Hospital (ER) and have a open wound.. chances are you die of an infection. How is this preventable??? This is a big problem atm and there is no good solution. you cant test people if they come in bleeding like hell for Resistant bacteria. I mean you can but ... I would like to hear the solution to that problem. Thank you.

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I once spoke with a nurse who said they have the walls scrubbed on a regular basis. I can't recall if it was daily or weekly, I think weekly.

They're not paying the nurses to do that, the people who are doing it probably consider it shitty work and I wouldn't be surprised if things get missed due to the sheer crappiness of the work.

I think there's probably a reality there that can't reasonable worked around. Sure, in theory a perfect scrub will solve the problem but how do you regulate that into effectiveness?

The best you can do is to design tools to make it less shitty but you'll never make it non-shitty.

No direct experience here, but afaik the solution is strict hygienic standards, constant testing and isolation of positive cases.

In germany we have this allready but it doesnt work. It reduce the problem. But the real problem is ER. In a life death situation it doesnt work. ER are very hard to keep clean. But yes you are absolutly right

EDIT:// I am no doctor but did work in Hospitals. Doctor friends working in ER are telling me about those dangers. And also bigger Hospitals have less control about it.

> it doesnt work. It reduce the problem

That's the goal.

Other countries seem to be successful with this approach, so might just be Germany failing? Which would not surprise me at all.

> The high-income countries with the most HARIs were Germany and Greece, ranking 6th and 17th globally, respectively.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10263350/

HARI: Hospital-associated antibiotic-resistant infections

hey thanks. I also had the impression/

220nm light is under investigation since it's germicidal but so far appears far less harmful to humans than other UV ranges. If those findings are validated we might see some permanent narrow-band, low-power UV lights in hospitals.

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