Waging war against infections.

Byline: Elizabeth Suh

BUTLER, Pa. _ With red-and-white tape and big drapes, Dr. A. Thomas McGill hopes to accomplish something of a revolution.

He uses the tape to line the floor in the doorway of patient rooms at Butler Memorial Hospital in western Pennsylvania. It's a reminder for workers to clean their hands. The large drape, which the hospital had to special-order, fully covers a patient to keep the area sterile when doctors insert a catheter.

``It's harder to effect a change,'' McGill said of the attempts to prevent hospital-acquired infections. ``But when you do, you affect hundreds of thousands of people at a time.''

The efforts of McGill and his colleagues have helped drastically reduce rates of some infections at Butler Memorial _ one of the goals Pennsylvania officials had in mind a couple of years ago when the state began requiring its hospitals to report those rates in their wards.

And reducing infections is the goal of activists elsewhere around the country, too, as they press for more hospital accountability.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that about one in 20 patients gets an infection in U.S. hospitals each year. About 90,000 people die from those infections.

But there are no comparable numbers for most states, because they have not publicly tracked infection rates.

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