Thursday, April 7, 2011  Banning hands-free faucets: Is Hopkins
throwing the bathwater out with the bathwater?  I hope everyone
enjoyed SHEA.  Overall, a good meeting with good weather and
good science.  I pinch-hit as a moderator for a hand-hygiene
session on Saturday.  The original moderator (i.e. Mike Edmond,
have you heard of him??) was scheduled to moderate two sessions
at the same time and for some reason wasn't able to pull it
off.  ;)  There were interesting studies presented in the
session including an abstract highlighting iScrub, which Dan has
mentioned before.  One particular abstract garnered a lot of
press attention - I'm not used to hearing about data in the
morning newspaper before the abstract is presented, for example.
The study was conducted by Emily Snydor, Lisa Maragakis and
colleagues at Johns Hopkins Hospital and aimed to determine the
safety of touchless water faucets in their hospital.  They
compared 20 newly installed automatic faucets with 20 old
standard faucets and found that 50%