New York » Looks like doctors aren't the only ones who should scrub before surgery. Bathing patients with an antiseptic and squirting medicated ointment up their noses dramatically cut the rate of dangerous staph infections afterward, researchers found.

A second study found the antiseptic did a better job of preventing infections than the reddish-brown iodine solution that's been used for decades to swab the skin before an operation.

Infections are a vexing problem for hospitals. About 30 million surgical procedures are done each year, and up to a half million Americans develop surgical-site infections, mostly from staph bacteria.

While attention has been focused on ways to stop health care workers from spreading bugs, patients can also contaminate themselves with the germs they harbor in their noses or on their skin.

Two new studies, published in today's New England Journal of Medicine , tried different approaches to killing those bacteria to see if that reduced the number of post-surgery infections.

U.S. researchers tested a newer antiseptic against the iodine solution commonly used to prep surgery patients and found it cut all surgical-site infections by 40 percent. The study's leader, Dr. Rabih Darouiche, of the Michael DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston, expects the newer antiseptic to replace iodine.

In the Netherlands, researchers screened patients and treated those who had staph bacteria with nasal ointment and antiseptic baths and reduced staph infections by nearly 60 percent compared to dummy treatments.

The study was done at five hospitals in the Netherlands and involved 917 mostly surgical patients who tested positive for staph bacteria when they were admitted. They were treated with either mupirocin ointment twice daily and daily baths with antiseptic chlorhexidine soap or dummy ointment and soap. Over the next six weeks, about 3 percent of the treated group had staph infections compared to about 8 percent in the dummy treatment group. The treatment also cut average hospital stays by two days.

The U.S. study at six hospitals included 849 patients who were having surgeries with a moderate risk for infection. The incision area was cleaned with either the iodine scrub or a mixture of chlorhexidine and alcohol. A month later, the overall infection rate in the chlorhexidine group was about 10 percent compared to 16 percent for iodine.