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Zung Wan Kim, a surgeon in Port Chester, New York, preps for surgery like a prizefighter before a major bout. First he punches a soap dispenser button with his foot and delivers a low blow to a faucet switch with his knee. Then he rubs the soap over his hands for more than a minute and rinses it off with graceful left and right hooks under the stream of water. He jabs at his nails with a sterile brush for more than another minute, rinses, scrubs his hands with a sterile sponge, rinses again, and then repeats the initial wash and rinse. Ding! The bell goes off on Kim's timer, ending a full five-minute round of hand-washing.
Seem obsessive? Sure, until you consider that the life of the hernia patient next door depends on Kim’s routine. And recent events have shown that even ordinary hand-washing may once again become a matter of getting really sick or staying well. In August of this year, federal health experts reported that four children in Minnesota and North Dakota were fatally infected by Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium easily passed through hand-to-hand contact. A strain of S. aureus has in recent years become resistant to the popular antibiotic methicillin. Yet any good hand-washing can still send it down the drain.
Lulled by the success of antibiotics in general, Americans have come to think of compulsory hand-washing as a thing of the past—a holdover from the sterile, hyperhygienic 1950s. But more than half the staph infections caught by hospital patients are now resistant to methicillin (up from 2 percent in 1974), and according to some epidemiologists, the deaths in Minnesota and North Dakota are just the tip of the iceberg. “With the possible exception of immunization,” says Ralph Cordell, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, “hand-washing is the most effective disease-preventing measure anyone can practice.”
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