Operating room personnel are a major source of
bacterial contamination. Microbiological counts in
an unoccupied operating room have been shown to
increase significantly when the door was left open to
the hallway [3]. The addition of 5 operating room
personnel further increased the microbiological
counts by more than 15-fold. Therefore, traffic in
and out of the operating room should be restricted,
and the number of personnel in the operating room
should be minimized [4]. Although many bacteria
are normally shed every minute by all individuals,
some individuals, known as dispersers, shed substantially
more bacteria, and their presence in the
operating room has been associated with an
increased prevalence of wound infection [5,6].