The physicians who are ultimately responsible for the disease and the loss of life resulting from the continuous increase of nosocomial infections are surely not evil men and women who intend to do harm to their patients.
Why, then, do they not religiously wash their hands in accordance with their own requirements? Why do they not regularly clean their stethoscopes?
Why is it that CDC officer William Jarvis has advised the public that the problem of nosocomial infections is "probably getting worse" and not better?
It seems fair to conclude from the facts on the ground that there is little evidence available today to indicate that conventional physicians believe in or accept evolutionary germ theory. The dominant medical view appears to be that since we have antibiotics we can kill the pathogens anyway, so why worry? This notion of killing off pathogens with antibiotics represents a crystal clear example of mechanistic thinking at work. Such prevalent thought patterns are transparently non-organismic and non-evolutionary, which goes a long way in explaining the chronic difficulty in improving physician understanding of the causes of increasing pathogen virulence. As one result, the problem of nosocomial infection continuously grows worse in the United States, propelled by the prevalence of a mechanistic and dualistic mind-set within the field of conventional medicine. The following story will further illustrate the absurdity of the present situation.
During August 1999, the FDA reported that four children had died from a strain of S. aureus that is resistant to the drug methicilin. As has been previously noted, there are now strains of S. aureus that have built up resistance to vancomycin, the most powerful pharmaceutical weapon available to physicians prior to the arrival of a new class of antibiotics being ushered in by the FDA’s approval of a drug called Synercid. On September 21, 1999, the FDA approved Synercid, announcing it as "the first of a new class of antibiotics" aimed at treating hospitalized patients who have been infected with Enterococcus faecium or other bacteria that are resistant to all of the antibiotic drugs previously approved by the FDA. George M. Eliopoulos, an infectious disease researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, greeted the FDA approval announcement as follows: "I would say that it’s always exciting to have another option available."
On the basis of Paul Ewald’s studies and of the experience of the past several decades, it seems reasonable to anticipate that this new class of drugs will gradually result in yet another increase in the virulence of the pathogens it has been designed to kill, posing an even more significant set of threats to the general population.
It may be that only in America could such a profound aberration persist in the field of medicine for so long a time without interruption or correction. In any event, it seems eminently reasonable to conclude from the foregoing facts that, as a new millennium continues to unfold, the prevailing medical mind-set has not changed in the slightest, nor have medical practice patterns been altered in any significant manner with regard to the "dirty little secret" about hand washing by physicians, or its implications for limiting the spread of virulent infections. Americans continue to die needlessly and in large numbers as the direct result of the persistence of this manifest absurdity.
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