In community hospitals in the Southeast United States, an easily spread bacterium appears to have overtaken MRSA as the most common hospital-acquired infection. But a pilot project in Ohio found that pushing hard on things such as hand washing and thorough cleaning can lower rates of that bug significantly. A study of a quarter of the state’s hospitals showed that following strict guidelines on hand washing, contact isolation, and cleaning caused the number of cases to fall from 7.7 per 10,000 patient days in the hospital to 6.7 between the first and last half of 2009.
