'In one sense, this is hardly news. Hospitals, as far back as records allow – at least to 230 BC, when King Ashoka is said to have founded some eighteen dedicated hospitals in ancient India – have faced a fundamental problem.
When you crowd sick people together, communicable diseases get to spread easily from patient to patient. Thus, once the nature of communicable diseases was finally understood, the first isolation wards came into being. And that worked reasonably well until the uncontrolled use of antibiotics began creating superbugs that could not be contained in isolation wards. We're talking about superbugs that travel on the skin or saliva of healthy people – or on the shoes of anyone walking into (or out of) a hospital for that matter. Our worst science fiction movies are on the verge of becoming real life.'
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