You get sick, you think: go to hospital. At least in Great Britain, where they tend to drop articles that would normally appear in a sentence before a place. If you’re American, you’d think that you should go to the hospital. Either way, it’s a good place to go if you’re ill or injured. Problem is, it turns out hospitals are also a great place to become even more ill and even die.

A March 2008 episode of the PBS medical panel discussion show Second Opinion reveled some startling figures. Every year in the United States about two million people who enter a hospital leave with an illness they acquired during their stay, a conundrum known as hospital-acquired infections. Even worse, around 100,000 people who contract a hospital-acquired illness die from it.

It makes sense on the one hand: Hospitals are places where the infectiously ill all come together under one roof to be treated…