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Healthcare workers' hands clearly can transmit organisms from one patient to another, and washing hands between patients clearly limits nosocomial outbreaks. However, considerably less evidence addresses the role of nonsterile medical equipment in transmitting infection: Should we be decontaminating our stethoscopes and reflex hammers as assiduously as we do our hands? In this study, researchers wearing sterile gloves used sterilized stethoscopes to perform standardized brief physical exams on 33 patients admitted to a Swiss hospital; standard microbiology techniques were used to quantify bacterial contamination of examiners' hands and stethoscopes.
Stethoscope diaphragms picked up significantly fewer total aerobic bacteria than did examiner…