HOLLIS S. BODMAN COLLECTS AND CULTURES MICROBES FROM THE OPERATING ROOM, MONIEK SPAEPEN FROM INHALATION-THERAPY EQUIPMENT, JUDITH SCOTT FROM INTRAVENOUS SOLUTIONS AND ROBERT PERKINS FROM OTHER CRITICAL AREAS.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: STARGATE
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010085-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: November 4, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 9, 2014
• Sequence Number: 85
• Publication Date: July 20, 1974
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2014/01/09: CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010085-2
1/41,
Scott checks the intravenous solutions to make sure they are not contaminated.
areas of the hospital. Hollis S. Bod-
man collects and cultures microbes
from the operating room, Moniek
Spaepen from inhalation-therapy equip-
ment, Judith Scott from intravenous
solutions and Robert Perkins from other
critical areas. The staff also takes regu-
lar cultures from patients at special
risk of infection, such as burn patients,
and from the environment of special-
risk patients. For instance, they sampled
not only the food but the sherry to be
consumed by one immunosuppressed
patient.
Using their sampling skills to identify
pathogens, the staff then puts the in-
formation obtained to practical use.
Their sampling of microorganisms has
led to rigid and detailed recommenda-
tions for hospital housecleaning?how
to clean the operating room floor and
how often, the need to wash staff and
patient gowns in germicides, not just
in soap, the need to change the water
in the humidifiers for inhalation therapy
every 24 hours to maintain sterility.
The staff then follows up with more
monitoring, to make sure that the rec-
ommendations are being implemented.
They devised a technique for recover-
ing the kinds and numbers of microbes
from intravenous solutions. They now
use the technique to check exact dupli-
cates of the solutions patients are to
receive. They have found that when
intravenous solutions are contaminated,
the fungi and bacteria in the solutions
usually come from the air in the rooms
where the solutions were prepared.
This discovery led to better cleaning of
these rooms. They have been instru-
mental in getting ultraviolet lamps in-
stalled in the operating rooms because
they found that the lamps reduce the
danger of pathogens getting into pa-
tients' wounds during surgery.
Lutheran General Hospital in Park
Ridge, Ill., is a community (nonteaching)
hospital that routinely monitors critical
areas of the hospital and puts the data
to use. Microbiologist James G. Shaffer
reports that he and his staff at Lutheran
have traced pathogens before they
caused infections. For instance, they
found Staphylococcus in the nursery.
This bacterium is especially dangerous
to patients with post-operative wounds.
The bacterium, Shaffer declares, prob-
ably wouldn't have been observed if
they hadn't done routine sampling.
Shaffer and his co-workers have also
found a strong correlation between the
amounts of microorganisms in the hos-
pital and the quality of housekeeping.
When the count gets high, they get
after the housekeeping staff to do a
better job. "These people," says Shaffer,
"are more likely to be impressed by a
[microbial] colony than by a com-
ment."
The Baltimore Cancer Research Cen-
ter also believes in vigorously tracking
down hospital microbes and using the
information obtained to prevent infec-
tions. "My philosophy," says the cen-
ter's chief microbiologist, Viola Mae
rehart-Treiche
2
0
a.
Kundsin: Monitoring with a purpose.
Young, "is that one has to very care-
fully study the environment of any
situation they find themselves in. In
other words, we have just moved to
the University of Maryland. Here I
will do intense surveillance culturing
until I know the cleaning is up to
standard. I will discover what the prob-
lem areas are and take care of them.
Once I have that fully in hand, I will
do more spot checking, not quite as
much as on a routine basis." Because the
center's patients are extremely suscepti-
ble to infections, Young and her staff
also culture bacteria regularly from
various recesses of the patients' bodies.
This way a pathogen can be spotted
immediately, the patient treated and
isolated from other patients.
Might more hospitals be turning
"microbe hunters" loose to effectively
prevent hospital infections? "The cur-
rent trend is away from this," Young
says. "It is not very encouraging."
"I don't see any trend toward quali-
ty-control checking of critical areas,"
McGarrity agrees. "I would like to.
Some sampling can give you a good
handle on what is happening as far as
infection control is concerned."
"No, there is no upsurge of interest,"
Kundsin concurs. "Actually the CDC
has been downgrading it, saying one
has to look for an epidemic. My claim
is that we have an epidemic. Anything
that is not normal is an epidemic. Pick-
ing up infections in the hospital, that's
not normal. It shouldn't be." 0
July 2( Declassified and Approved For Release 2014/01/09: CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010085-2 45
Declassified and Approved For Release 2014/01/09: CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010085-2
Off the Beat
Geller performs
for physicists
Some physicists among our readers
have criticized us for paying attention
to the strange feats of Uri Geller, the
young Israeli who can bend keys with-
out touching them (SN: 11/10/73, p.
300). Other physicists, however, are in-
terested and somewhat perplexed as the
following report delivered to us by the
theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatt indi-
cates.
We present Sarfatt's report in Off
The Beat rather than in our regular
news columns because we are some-
what dubious about its being science
news: No one has yet published a test-
able hypothesis about what is going on.
Before presenting the report we
would like to enter the caveat that phy-
sicists should be the last people on
earth to reject psychokinesis out of
hand since they have a name for it,
Pauli effect, that refers to one of their
most distinguished and colorful col-
leagues, the late Wolfgang Pauli.
Pauli, who was mercifully a theoreti-
cal physicist, was notorious for being
able to foul up any experiment in
sight by his mere presence in the lab-
oratory. The most outrageous Pauli
story we have come across?and we
remember reading this in the memoirs
of a reputable physicist, but we can't
remember whose memoirs?concerns
James Franck, who at the time was
doing vacuum-physics experiments at
the University of Gottingen.
Vacuum experiments in those days
were done with complex arrays of
glass tubing. One day at about noon,
Franck's experiment suddenly blew up
or?as the modern jargon would have
it?imploded. Franck checked every-
thing out and could not understand
why. Some days later he got a letter
from a friend in Copenhagen that told
him by the way that Pauli had arrived
in Copenhagen on the day of the acci-
dent. Franck checked out the circum-
stances of Pauli's trip and discovered
that at the exact moment of the dis-
aster Pauli's train was standing in the
Gottingen station. Case closed.
The above story may have to be
qualified as possibly apocryphal since
we do not have sworn affidavits attest-
ing to it. Sarfatt's report on the latest
Geller-Prilfung refers to a veritable
cloud of witnesses. Here it is:
Uri Geller was tested on June 21,
1974 by John Hasted (professor of
experimental physics, Birkbeck Col-
lege, London) and David Bohm (pro-
fessor of theoretical physics, Birkbeck
College). Participants and witnesses to
the test include the physicists Keith
Birkinshaw and Ted Basin and myself.
Also present were the writer Arthur
Koestler and the psychic researcher
Brendan O'Regan. Several experiments
were conducted.
In one of them, Geller placed Sar-
fatt's hand on top of several metallic
objects which included a flat circular
disk allegedly cut from a single crystal.
A piece of plastic separated the palm
of Sarfatt's hand from the disk. Geller's
hand was in contact with Sarfatt's for
approximately two minutes. Upon ex-
amination, the circular disk was found
to be significantly bent. Detailed studies
of the disk are being conducted at the
Birkbeck Laboratories. A precise moni-
toring of the location of the disk dur-
ing Geller's psychokinetic action could
not be made. However, it was absolute-
ly impossible for the disk to have been
tampered with by means of tricks while
it was under Sarfatt's hand.
Geller also succeeded in triggering
a very strong burst from a Geiger coun-
ter tube that he held in his hand. The
creation of the burst happened almost
simultaneously with Geller's expressed
intention to create it. The magnitude
of the burst was conservatively esti-
mated by Hasted to be in the region of
100 to 150 counts per second which
should be compared to a normal back-
ground rate of about one per second.
Hasted is now carefully studying auto-
matic recordings of this event and
several others similar to it The crea-
tion of the burst was correlated with
strong breathing and signs of great
physical exertion on Geller's part.
Geller complained of a sensation simi-
lar to an electric shock. There was no
possibility of any electric shock com-
ing from the instrumentation.
Geller then succeeded in bending
several pieces of metal by psycho-
energetic action. These objects included
the blade of a knife and a key belong-
ing to Bohm. The flow of water from
a tap on to the metal seemed to make
the bending occur more easily. The
bending times were of the order of
several tens of seconds.
Another test of Geller was made on
June 22, 1974, at Birkbeck. Geller was
able to repeat his performance of the
day before with the Geiger counter
tube. Witnesses to this ?test included
the American concert pianist, Byron
Janis and the artist Maria Cooper
Janis. On this occasion, Koestler re-
ported a strong sensation simultaneous
with the Geiger tube burst. Koestler
was visibly shaken for several minutes.
Geller also succeeded in bending the
house key of the science fiction writer,
Arthur C. Clarke while being con-
tinuously watched by Clarke, Koestler,
A. V. Cleaver (former director of the
Rockets Division, Rolls Royce Ltd.)
and Arthur Ellison (department of
electrical engineering, City University
of London). Clarke, who was previ-
ously skeptical of Geller's authenticity
has publicly challenged any magician
to "put up or shut up" in regard to
duplicating Geller's feat under identical
conditions.
Geller also -succeeded in duplicating
a drawing made by Koestler. Full de-
tails on the Birkbeck tests are being
prepared for publication by Hasted
and Bohm. Independent tests were made
by John Taylor (department of mathe-
matics, King's College, London) with
Geller during the last week in June.
My personal professional judgment as
a Ph.D. physicist is that Geller demon-
strated genuine psycho-energetic ability
at Birkbeck, which is beyond the doubt
of any reasonable man, under relative-
ly well controlled and repeatable ex-
perimental conditions. While the ex-
perimental conditions were not perfect,
the events at Birkbeck do represent a
major step forward in the new field of
experimental psycho-energetics.
?Jack Sar/alt
On the statistics of
scientific meetings
In the court of Nero, tradition tells
us, there was an official called arbiter
elegantarum. The holder of this office
was one Petronius, traditionally identi-
fied with the author of that polymor-
phous perverse romp, Satyricon, which
Federico Fellini recently made into a
revoltingly fascinating film. The func-
tion of the said Petronius at court was
to be a kind of Emily Post at the orgy,
determining who reclined where and
who took precedence over whom in the
games and sports that were indulged in.
I propose that what the scientific
world now needs is a kind of arbiter
scientiarutn, an officer whose function
it would be to review the precedences
of scientific meetings and avoid con-
flicts. Perhaps the International Coun-
cil of Scientific Unions would be a
proper body to set up such an office.
The thought comes up because of a
recent week, that of June 10, during
which I could have attended three sepa-
rate meetings for enlightenment and
profit. To review them, they were: a
conference on experimental general rel-
ativity in Cambridge, Mass., a meeting
on submillimeter radio astronomy in
Bishop, Calif., and a meeting on quan-
tum electronics in San Francisco.
The choice finally went to the quan-
tum electronics meeting. Cambridge
was early out because it was clear for
other reasons that I would have to be
in California at the time. It would be
disingenuous to pretend that the venue
of the quantum electronics meeting in
my favorite city of all North America,
4 Declassified and Approved For Release 2014/01/09: CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010085-2 Vol. 106