ABSTRACT
‘Infection control is in your hands’. This statement and many others like it remind people, particularly in the health care environment, that infection control is a personal matter, a matter to be personally and individually controlled. Having worked in many hospitals on two continents I always find it surprising that people think that hospitals are bastions of asepsis – that is, without infection. The reality is that hospitals are absolute cesspools of disease and illness. This is not to say that hospitals are unclean or unhygienic, but rather people seem surprised that there are infections, germs and bacteria there within. If you follow the lines of logic, that a hospital contains a collection of the ‘sick and infirm’ altogether in one place, then to continue this logic, do you then expose the weak and infirmed to even more disease and illness?
