Medical Singularity

So we have 100,000 people a year who pick up infections at hospitals, all because somebody didn’t wash their hands. And it is a — it has become a kind of emblematic sign of how much difficulty we’re having in medicine in grappling with our complexity. This is not about how great your doctor is or how great your nurse is; this is about how great the system is in making sure everybody does the right thing. And you would think that this we could do: just make sure everybody washes their hands. And — sorry, I got the number wrong: 2,000,000 people pick up infections in hospitals, but 100,000 die from those infections. So when you’re talking about that kind of public health impact, the fact that we hadn’t solved it is a serious indictment of where we are.