Handwashing Research Paper

“Handwashing is the single most important means of preventing the spread of infection” says the United States Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. This article summarizes the crucial events that have lead up to the realization of hand-washing’s impact on our health by doctors overtime. Beginning with Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1843. Holmes saw the condition in American hospitals of the childbed fever, which he believed to be an infectious disease passed to pregnant women by the hands of doctors. Holmes therefor advocated hand-washing to prevent childbed fever. In the late 1840’s, Dr Ignaz Semmelweis observed the mortality rate in a maternity ward staffed by medical students was three times higher than in a second delivery room staffed

One of these interesting facts being that although there have been advancements in education, modern plumbing,and emerging challenges related to increasing antibiotic resistance, physicians of all people are resistant to the most fundamental infection control practice being hand washing. I also found it interesting that in 1992, The News England Journal of Medicine reported on a hand-washing study in an intensive-care unit. Despite special education and monitored observations, handwashing rates were as low as 30% and never went above 48%. I also learned that over 2,000,000 hospital patients acquire some type of nosocomial infection each year in the US alone, at an annual cost of over $45 billion. Another fact I learned is that hospital personnel can also get nosocomial infection, and in 1993 11 health-care workers became ill with hepatitis A because they didn't wash their hands after treating one of two patients with hepatitis A. Another interesting fact I read is that it is estimated that there are over 80 million cases of food poisoning in the US each year and 325,000 hospitalizations resulting in greatly increased health care costs, loss of job productivity, and as many as 9,000 deaths per