Germ watch

Two items of interest regarding germs in hospital:

* Keep that lotion away from me. In Barcelona in 2008, there was a case of an intensive care unit making its patients sick through its use of a body lotion. Apparently, skin care products in the European Union do not need to be sterile, and tests confirmed that the bug in the hospital was coming from the sealed lotion.

* And while you're at it, get off my bed. A letter recently published in the BMJ notes this:

A comprehensive drive to get staff to decontaminate hands before and after touching patients or contaminated surfaces is useless if they then sit on consecutive beds on a ward.

You can't be too careful.

* Cats driving us mad, continued: I hadn't read anything about toxoplasma gondii (carried by your cat) causing schziophrenia for a while, and in fact I thought some recent studies indicated it may not account for many cases. But it's grouped with 2 other forms of infections looked at in a recent paper that argues:

“While replication in independent samples is warranted, the data from our sample suggest that up to approximately 30 percent of schizophrenia cases could be prevented in the offspring of the pregnant population [in the review appearing in AJP in Advance] if we were to completely eliminate three of the infections we studied—influenza, elevated Toxoplasma antibody, and peri-conceptional genital-reproductive infections,” Brown told Psychiatric News.