Dirty Hospitals?

"You are villains in a plot against your patients," a crusading Boston surgeon told a gathering of colleagues in Washington last week. Continued Dr. Carl Waldemar Walter: "Because of your negligence, 90% of the nation's hospitals are a menace to health. You should clean up the operating rooms . . . Lax operation of a hospital assures maximal multiplication of pathogenic monsters [i.e., germs]. The result is a carefully managed system that inoculates patients with virulent bacteria along with enough foreign bodies to guarantee disaster."

To many surgeons this was a familiar plaint from Dr. Walter, 51, who was trained at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital under the late, famed Surgeon Elliott Cutler. Says Walter: there are plenty of effective ways to sterilize surgeons' hands, their gloves, instruments and other equipment; the trouble is that bacteria are wafted around a patient's wound from faulty air conditioning, doctors' and nurses' noses and throats, or from a floor recently swabbed with a filthy mop ("The mop gets in the wound more than the hemostat"). Other Walter points: P:Hospitals pay their workers so little that they get only the poorly educated, who cannot understand the difference between "clean" and truly germfree. Further, the help get little on-the-job training. P: Doctors rely too much on antibiotics, ignoring the fact that bacteria which defy the antibiotics stay around hospitals.

Despite his crusade to maintain the highest germ-free standards not only in the operating room but throughout the hospital, Dr. Walter keeps a black poodle in his office at Peter Bent Brigham.

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