Celia Hatton

Helen Briggs.

Let's stay with health.

Imagine going to a hospital bathroom and realizing it doesn't have any sinks where you can wash your hands.

This is what it's like in parts of one UK hospital, and it's actually a strategy to fight bacteria.

In what's thought to be the first experiment of its kind here, a hospital in England has removed nearly all the sinks from its intensive care unit to minimize waterborne contamination.

It's now believed that hospital sinks, drains, and waste pipes can sometimes cling on to dangerous bacteria.

Handwashing, when it's not done to a high standard, may be causing infections rather than preventing them.

Dr. Manjula Mehta is a microbiologist who led this initiative at Wexham Park Hospital in Slough.

She spoke to my colleague, Evan Davis.

What we're understanding increasingly from scientific evidence that's been gathered around the world is that antimicrobial resistance or bugs that are resistant to all known antibiotics, which we are now able to track, is that these bugs are being transmitted from hospital wastewater systems to patients.

And the threat is so great that there are estimates which suggest that there are about 200 people dying every hour globally because of these type of infections.

And a majority of those are due to what we call gram-negative bacteria that are residing in our hospital drains.

What's happening is because of the way sinks have been designed and there's numerous factors like what the velocity of water is.

You can imagine when you turn a tap on, there's always going to be droplets of water that lands on your clothes, for example, or on the surfaces surrounding the sink.

So when this happens, it's not just the water that's landing on those surfaces or on your hands.

It's also that the bacteria that are there also.

on the sink surface itself or in the sink plug hole, which can carry various types of really antibiotic resistant bacteria that we often encounter in hospitals.

For many years now, the WHO standard for hand decontamination has been that alcohol hand sanitizers are the gold standard.

And we've known this for quite some time.

And we know that hand hygiene itself, you know, when you think of hand washing, it's done effectively at best at about 30% of times.