Microbiologists warned on the day that Gordon Brown, the prime minister, announced the “deep clean” policy that such routine annual cleans would be ineffective and the medical journal The Lancet has since said they will not affect the risk of infection.

Challenged by MPs on the Commons’ health committee that the policy was really “more a publicity exercise than evidence based”, Mr Johnson said that would be “a fair point to make if the only thing we were announcing was deep clean”.

From:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2836088a-9ee7-11dc-b4e4-0000779fd2ac.html

Brown’s claim to competence is already finished – kaput. He sold our gold reserves at giveaway prices, vandalised our pension schemes with the sledgehammer of tax, opened the doors to unchecked immigration (ministers have no idea how many foreign workers are here), demanded unconscionable sacrifices from our Armed Forces (for which they pay in blood), and managed the nation’s money so ineptly that, despite a long period of economic growth, the United Kingdom is on course this year for a £40 billion shortfall in public finances, £6 billion more than Brown predicted in his last Budget.

On July 24, 2006 Health Direct posted NHS targets blamed as crowded wards increase risk of superbugs when we noted that there is a scientific correlation between high bed occupancy rates with high MRSA superbug ineffections, and deaths.

Government targets to cut NHS hospital waiting times are putting patients at increased risk of infection with the superbug MRSA, an official report has revealed. An internal policy review conducted by the Department of Health, leaked to The Independent, has for the first time shown that there is a direct link between the number of patients in hospital – measured by bed occupancy – and MRSA rates. Ministers have denied there is a link.

The most crowded hospitals, with occupancy rates over 90 per cent, have MRSA rates that are over 42 per cent higher than average, according to the report. Those with occupancy rates above 85 per cent have MRSA rates 16 per cent above average.

The findings of the review are considered so sensitive that two attempts by The Independent to obtain the report under the Freedom of Information Act were rejected. Reducing bed occupancy in all NHS trusts to a maximum of 85 per cent would save 1,000 cases of MRSA a year, it says.

The latest figures for 2004-05 show that 88 NHS trusts in England, one fifth of the total, had occupancy rates over 90 per cent and almost half (45 per cent) had occupancy rates over 85 per cent.