By a show of hands who has had or knows someone who has had a legal medical procedure, performed in recent memory, without sterile instruments, in an unhygienic environment, in the United States.
That’s what we thought.
We’ve come a long way from the days when “a man laid on the operating table of one of our surgical hospitals is more exposed to more chance of death than was the English soldier on the field of Waterloo” (Sir James Young Simpson, Surgeon and Professor of Medicine and Midwifery (1860s)).1
But we aren’t there yet.
Despite a $987M and growing market for surface disinfectants, 1 out of every 25 hospitalized patients are affected by a healthcare-associated infection (HAI).
