SWINE flu and hospital superbugs may have a common weapon: the dirty hands of doctors and nurses that act as germ “superspreaders”.
Didier Guillemot of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, and colleagues created a mathematical model of a hypothetical intensive care unit (ICU) with a staff of 22.
They found that staff who saw all patients briefly were better at spreading germs than those who tended a few patients very closely. If just one of the former always failed to wash their hands, it caused more infections than if the entire staff forgot one-quarter of the time (Proceedings of…
