He made each hospital room work more like an operating room, in otherwords. He also arranged for a nasal culture to be taken from every patient upon admission, whether the patient seemed infected or not. That way the staff knew which patients carried resistant bacteria and could preemptively use more stringent precautions for them—“search-and-destroy” the strategy is sometimes called. Infection rates for MRSA—the hospital contagion responsible for more deaths than any other—fell almost 90 percent, from four to six infections per month to about that many in an entire year.
