It has been said that "the clothes make the man." And with all the hullabaloo surrounding Sarah Palin's $150,000 campaign wardrobe, it is clear that clothes can also make — or, perhaps, in Palin's case — unmake the woman.
Regardless of what one thinks of the first quote or Palin's attire, clothes do matter and, in the health care field, they might soon matter more than most people realize.
I recently received an email from an old friend and she wanted to know if "unlearning" had implications for her field of expertise — infection control. The short answer is "maybe."
I say "maybe" because I don't know much about her specific field. I do, however, follow advances in emerging technologies and I recently came across two articles that suggest that specialists in infection control might want to put "germ-killing" clothing on their radar screen.
Researchers in England and the United States are now actively exploring how to deploy nanotechnology-enhanced textiles to fight the MRSA infections in hospitals. (The link to the second article is entitled: "Killer Kevlar: Clothing That Shields From Germs".)
Now, I'm not suggesting that new lines of clothing will completely eradicate staph infections at hospitals, but it is possible that new nano-enhanced surgical gowns, bedding, curtains and pillows might add another layer of protective defense against the growing threat of drug-resistant germs.
