In GCSE Science students will look at the requirements for staying healthy. This is the fifth of six quizzes on that topic and it looks specifically at fighting pathogens which cause disease, such as bacteria and viruses.
We have Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis to thank for modern standards of hygiene in our hospitals. He discovered that more women were dying in maternity wards manned by doctors than in those manned by midwives. He realised the difference was that the doctors performed post-mortems on women who died from a disease called 'childbed fever' but the midwives only delivered babies from healthy women. At the time, doctors didn't bother washing their hands so they were passing on the pathogens which cause infection to healthy patients.