I’m reading a fascinating book by Daniel Everett, entitled, “Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle”. I’m no linguist, but I enjoy his observations about how the development of language is informed by the needs of the culture—based upon his time living and working with the Pirahã people in the Amazon. One of his observations, also described by his colleague Peter Gordon in this Science article, has to do with the way the Pirahã “count” (or describe an amount) by using a “one-two-many” system. How is this relevant to hospital infection prevention, you ask? Well, as we adopt a new goal of zero HAIs, and as infection rates (and denominators) become much less important than whether an infection occurred or not, I wonder if we should simplify our surveillance by using a “zero-one-two-many” system to count HAIs….it sure would save a lot of time.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
One-Two-Many: A new way to count HAIs?
I’m reading a fascinating book by Daniel Everett, entitled, “Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle”. I’m no linguist, but I enjoy his observations about how the development of language is informed by the needs of the culture—based upon his time living and working with the Pirahã people in the Amazon. One of his observations, also described by his colleague Peter Gordon in this Science article, has to do with the way the Pirahã “count” (or describe an amount) by using a “one-two-many” system. How is this relevant to hospital infection prevention, you ask? Well, as we adopt a new goal of zero HAIs, and as infection rates (and denominators) become much less important than whether an infection occurred or not, I wonder if we should simplify our surveillance by using a “zero-one-two-many” system to count HAIs….it sure would save a lot of time.
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