With all the international advances in modern medicine international staph infections and germs  are still a major problem, including potential germ warfare. I was discussing the staph infection and germ problem with a friend and he said “ remember Dr. Semmelweis.”

In 1847 the Hungarian Dr Ignaz Semmelweis, “invented” antiseptic hand washing   to reduce the appalling rate of childbirth mortality in Vienna’s Doctor’s maternity ward. Simple hand washing today is as valid a life-saving antiseptic as it was 163 years ago.

Scorned by the medical profession during his lifetime, Dr. Semmelweis ,  discovered hand washing ,this simplest of all antiseptic regimes,  earned  immortality via the term  “Semmelweis Reflex.” It means the rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts established beliefs.

Ironically that century and half old “hand-washing” solution could dramatically cut staph infection today if  assiduously practiced worldwide.

HOW Dr. Semmelweis stumbled across this antiseptic breakthrough should make modern doctors blush and the ghost of Sherlock Holmes smile. He observed doctors in Vienna were performing cadaverous autopsies and then rushing over to the Doctor’s maternity ward to deliver babies. The Birthing mortality at the Doctor’s hospital was three times the mortality rate at the Midwives ward. And women who had “street births” rather than Doctor’s hospital births had an even lower rate of childbirth mortality.

Dr. Semmelweis suspected “cadaverous poisoning” was the cause of the high childbirth death rates in the Doctor’s ward and he proposed a simple prophylactic. He insisted doctors wash their hands with a solution chlorinated lime (calcium hypochlorite). Overnight the birthing mortality rate in the Doctor’s ward fell 90%. (That mortality rate had been running as high as 35%.)

More astounding: Dr. Semmelweis’s  discovery came long before Louis Pasteur’s  germ theory, but long after his death. The point is simple. Today there is a massive problem with staph infections and germs, to say nothing about the potential of germ warfare. Remember Dr. Semmelweis’s hand washing from 1847. This may be a lost art, but it is still a sound method to help prevent spreading serious, at times deadly infections.