16 July

Florence Nightingale once said if you want to control infection in a hospital, open the windows. Let fresh air in. Recent research suggests she knew what she was talking about, you get fewer infections in outdoor field hospitals than you do in modern gleaming sterile operating theatres. The idea of a 'sterile' environment is stupid, micro-organisms live in societies, not individually. Ironically what has produced superbugs *is* sterile environments, where individual microbes have been allowed to evolve independently from competition with other microbes. I'm on a health and hospitals theme at the moment, because I've been forced to spend some time there again, and it's the most non-healing experience I could imagine. You can't preserve life in environments devoid of life. Sterile in every meaning of that word, absent of emotion, feeling, agency, fresh air, colour, movement, privacy, humanity. People who work in these places are heroes, we need to change the model so badly.