99,000 dies of hospital infections ...65% don't clean lab coat in a week ... don't wash hands enough ...

Hazardous Hospitals: How the Profit Motive Can Kill You | by Yves Engler / July 28th, 2007

A front–page article in Yesterday’s New York Times reports “The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projected this year that one of every 22 patients would get an infection while hospitalized — 1.7 million cases a year — and that 99,000 would die, often from what began as a routine procedure.”

A little reported on New England Journal of Medicine study from a few months back concluded that 19,000 people die from preventable infections acquired during the insertion of catheters.
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... several European countries have all but eliminated MRSA, .... The New England Journal of Medicine study reports that catheter related blood stream infections dropped 66% with some minor changes (including rigorous hand-washing, thorough cleaning of the skin around catheters, and wearing sterile masks, gowns and gloves as well as removing catheters from patients as soon as possible and avoiding inserting catheters in the groin area). ... concluded that up to 75 percent of deadly infections caught in hospitals could be avoided by doctors and nurses using better washing techniques. (Studies show that over half of the time physicians fail to clean their hands before treating patients and that 65 percent of physicians and other medical professionals go more than a week without washing their lab coat.)
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The biggest barrier to improvement, however, is our economic system, which focuses on cures and technology because that’s where the biggest, quickest profits can be found. Pfizer isn’t likely to fund studies that look into the role hand-washing plays in hospital-acquired infections since they don’t see a profit in doing so. ...
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... More than 70 per cent of hospital-acquired infections are resistant to at least one common antibiotic. ...

According to an analysis of 1.5 million insurance claims for antibiotic prescriptions in 2004, 40% of people who filled an antibiotic prescription had not seen a doctor in at least a month. Without seeing the patient, how can doctors determine whether their symptoms were the result of a viral infection — which don’t respond to antibiotics — or a bacterial infection that do. This over-prescription of antibiotics increases the growth of multi-resistant organisms.

... Additionally, half of all antibiotics sold each year are used on animals, according to New Scientist. ... The administration of low doses is especially problematic since it becomes a feeding ground for organisms to mutate. ...

To end this practice, the European Union recently banned antibiotic growth promoters. Washington and Ottawa, kowtowing to the animal industry, have done little. ...