"Every year the treatment and care of hundreds of millions of patients worldwide is complicated by infections acquired during health care in hospitals," said Benedetta Allegranzi, a World Health Organisation (WHO) consultant from the University of Verona in Italy.

Allegranzi told the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy that too few doctors, nurses and other hospital workers follow hygiene rules.

Cultural, religious factors blamed

Cultural and religious factors "strongly influence" the lack of hand washing, she added.

Attitudes toward washing hands "may be different according to the perception of 'dirtiness' in different cultures and to a healthcare worker's skin color," Allegranzi said.

Helen Giamarellou of the Attikon university hospital in Athens presented the results of a three year study which said barely 25 percent of doctors disinfect their hands before attending to a patient.

The US government's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that nearly 90 000 people die each year from infections caught in US hospitals. About two million become ill from such infections each year.

The Staphylococcus aureus bacteria resists the methicillin anti-biotic and is the main cause of disease transmitted by dirty hands. Such illness has been growing around the world in the past 20 years, according to experts.

International campaign launched

The World Health Organisation and other health groups have had to launch an international campaign to improve cleanliness in hospitals.

It has included anthropologists among the experts working on a clean hands strategy that takes into account religious and cultural factors.

Alcohol-based rub causes problems

The WHO recommends using an alcohol-based water solution to act as a quick disenfectant before touching patients.

The Jewish, Islamic and Sikh religions teach everyday cleanliness. But Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism and the Sikh religion all ban the use of alcohol.

Ziad Memish, executive director of the Infection Prevention and Control Programme at the King Abdulaziz Medical Center in Riyadh, and a member of the WHO taskforce, has written a study on the use of alcohol-based hand rubs by Muslim health workers.

He said "the crux of the problem appears to be due to the designation of alcohol as 'haram', or forbidden, in Islam".

But he added that the Koran also recognises that alcohol has some medicinal virtues that can be used.

Objections from Muslims are more common in Western Europe than traditional Islamic countries, according to the study.

He said that the use of alcohol hand rubs had become a standard practice at the King Abdulaziz Medical Centre in recent years.

AFP