How doctors lie on death certificates to hide the true scale of the toll from hospital infections - UK

Continuing issues with C diff and MRSA in the UK - are the numbers higher than anticipated? According to this article, physicians are not always listing the correct cause of death so the numbers could be even higher...BD

Joan Horne once worked for the National Health Service. In her day the wards were scrubbed with bleach, while nurses washed their hands with soap and water before caring for a patient. If not, a strict matron wanted to know why. Only this week, a worried doctor told me that MRSA and C. diff is rife in London's major teaching hospitals. He said that of 16 patients in a single ward at one hospital 'four have C. diff and three have MRSA, and that is typical of the situation in every ward'.
She has never forgotten the golden era of the NHS. So when 78-year-old Joan watched Edwin, her husband of 37 years, die after catching a deadly superbug at her local hospital, she began a fight for justice.
In 2005, the latest year that death statistics for C. diff were available, 3,807 hospital patients died, a rise of almost 70 per cent over the previous 12 months. But the truth is that this figure may be utterly meaningless because many people, including Joan, believe there is a cover-up over the figures.
Just before Christmas, a tape recorder in her hand, she marched off to Barnsley Hospital in Yorkshire and forced managers to admit that not only had Edwin contracted a lethal infection called Clostridium difficile (C. diff) as a patient, but that doctors failed to declare the truth on his death certificate.