![]() Yokoe and Marino have seen measles, the plague, and rabbit fever (which is caused by a bacterium that is extraordinarily contagious in hospital laboratories and feared as a bioterrorist weapon). By the time the results came back, the neurosurgeon's brain-biopsy instruments might have transferred the disease to other patients, but infection-control team members tracked the instruments down in time and had them chemically sterilized. But they have coped with influenza epidemics, Legionnaires' disease, fatal bacterial meningitis, and, just a few months before, a case that, according to the patient's brain-biopsy results, might have been Creutzfeld-Jakob disease-a nightmare, not only because it is incurableand fatal but also because the infectious agent that causes it, known as a prion, cannot be killed by usual heat-sterilization procedures. ![]() Marino is in her fifties and reserved by nature. ![]() Yokoe is forty-five years old, gentle voiced, and dimpled. ![]() This is not flashy work, and they are not flashy people. Their full-time job, and that of three others in the unit, is to stop the spread of infection in the hospital. They work in our hospital's infection-control unit. PART I Diligence On Washing Hands One ordinary December day, I took a tour of my hospital with Deborah Yokoe, an infectious disease specialist, and Susan Marino, a microbiologist. ![]()
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