Meet the hygiene pioneer who discovered that handwashing saves lives
(WorldNews Africa)

Durban - Hungarian physician and scientist Dr Ignaz Semmelweis was the first to discover that washing hands reduced spreading infection - a discovery that has since saved millions of lives. But the irony of the remarkable doctor´s work is that he died from an infection, after being tricked into entering an insane asylum. In 1847, Semmelweis was working in a hospital in Vienna, Austria, and overseeing two maternity wards. He noticed that the second clinic had a low rate of infection with a mortality rate of less than 4%, while the first clinic had 17% of patients succumbing to `puerperal fever`, known at the time as `childbed fever`. It was common in hospitals and was often fatal. The two...