All the while when I was in the UK, I heard horror stories about how dirty the hospitals were, and how people were dying from infection. To have a simple, routine operation was to take your life in your hands. And then the same reports started to come out of Canada. I can't say this surprises me. Once upon a time, the UK social healthcare system was touted as the greatest in the world, and Canada based their system on it. And now they're all falling apart.

Dr. Mark Miller, the head of infection control at Montreal's Jewish General
Hospital, told reporters, "It is the general sanitation in the hospitals that is
under the microscope right now. You've got fewer housekeepers. You've got less
cleaning of patient rooms and less intensive cleaning." The situation is as bad
in Ontario.

I was born at that hospital. It used to be one of the best in Canada. Now they're worrying about keeping the floors clean.

Cleanliness practices have been dangerously eroded and hospitals are
overcrowded. "We have a big problem in terms of infection control," Dr. Karl
Weiss, an infectious disease specialist at Montreal's Maisonneuve-Rosemont
Hospital, told the medical association journal. "We are practising 21st-century
medicine in a 19th-century environment."

The Ontario government also must make special resources available for
hospital cleaning.

Its recent budget gave Sunnybrook hospital, as an example, a 1 per cent
increase. Hamilton Health Sciences Centre received a 1.3 per cent increase.
Inflation is 3 per cent. How are these institutions to cope with demands for
higher standards of cleanliness without additional targeted resources?

C. difficile is spread through the environment or by fecal-oral
transmission. The germs can survive for long periods outside the body on walls,
doorknobs, and furniture. The organisms can spread quickly throughout an
institution from patient to patient, or from caregivers to patients.No one is
necessarily safe.