Hospital Survival Guide

I said in class that there wasn't much you could do to prevent nosocomial infection in hospital but the Daily Mail, a British Newspaper, had an interesting article today that comes up with a variety of obvious, and not so obvious, ways you can help reduce the chances of infection if you do have to have an operation.
Your hospital survival guide: The ingenious tricks that can save you from superbugs and other hospital disasters

• Swallowing 300mg of aspirin daily for three days prior to surgery can halve your risk of developing a deadly infection, according to research from Dartmouth College in the U.S.

• Keep visitors off your bed. If they truly wish you a speedy recovery, your visitors should take a seat in a chair, not on your sheets. In a study published in the British Medical Journal, researchers found that a combination of infection-control strategies that included eliminating visitor contact with a patient's bed was able to stop the spread of MRSA and reduce the number of infections by 70 per cent.

and of course:

• Don't touch the toys!. Any children coming to visit need to be kept away from toys littering the waiting room. When University of Nottingham researchers swabbed the surfaces of 12 toys in an intensive-care unit, they found half of them swarming with various strains of bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus.