MRSA Notes

ABC News article related to the 20/20 show featuring Maureen Daly and Betsy McCaughey:

ABC News: Myth: Hospitals Keep You Safe from Germs
Oct. 14, 2005 — There’s a deadly threat hiding inside America’s hospitals. What’s even scarier, your hospital is probably keeping it a secret.

Maureen Daly’s mother was a healthy 63-year-old woman when she had surgery to fix a broken shoulder. However, after being admitted to the hospital, Daly’s mother got an infection that left her immobilized on a respirator. Daly was told that life-threatening germs are an inevitable fact of hospital life.

Daly was shocked. “I cannot accept that it would be a fact of life that you can walk into a hospital with a broken shoulder and leave practically dead,” she said.

Her mother died four months later. It turns out hospital infections are the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States.

Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York and founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, said, “These infections kill as many people each year in our country as AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined.”