SUPERBUGS like MRSA have been plaguing hospital wards for years despite repeated Government pledges to tackle the problem. It has reached the stage where some patients are now more concerned about what they might catch in hospital than their actual treatment.

Ministers, though, say they are taking the issue seriously and last week Health Secretary Alan Johnson set out plans explaining how hospitals should invest the extra £270m being made available for infection control. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has also made a big deal of the deep cleaning programme announced in September, even though critics dismissed it as a gimmick.

Health Protection Agency figures pointing to a drop in the number of MRSA cases seem to vindicate the Government's approach, but this is balanced by the number of cases of another bug, Clostridium difficile (or C.diff), which are 30 per cent higher than those recorded in 2004. In other words, the problem isn't going away. But apart from regularly cleaning wards from top to bottom, which is both costly and time-consuming, what else can be done?

A research team at Bradford University thinks it may have an answer. Mathematician Simon Shepherd, along with his colleague Clive Beggs, professor of medical technology, have come up with a system to identify the key routes of infection and transmission based around the method Google uses to rank search results on the internet.

"You would think that hospital infections would be relatively easy to solve, but obviously from the very high-profile cases we seem to hear about every other week clearly it's not," says Professor Shepherd.

"If you walk round any hospital you will find poster after posting telling you to wash your hands and it's perceived by the powers that be that since hand-washing has made some in-roads then it's the only way forward."

But he says some hospital infections, such as C.diff, cannot be tackled simply by doctors and nurses regularly washing their hands.

"No amount of extra hand-washing will improve the situation, all that will happen is nurses will get sore hands and you will reach the situation where nurses won't have time to do any nursing."

So where does Google fit in to all this?

"If you look at Google, the reason it is the pre-eminent search engine is because of its ability to rank pages and it occurred to me that the network of hospital infections was simply a graph – person A touches patient B who touches the door which person C then touches and so on."

Just as Google ranks web pages in order of popularity and usefulness, Prof Shepherd believes this technique can be adapted to help tackle hospital bugs.

"Hospitals have limited resources to combat and control infection, so by focusing on the areas most likely to spread infection as shown by our algorithm, it allows the most efficient use of these resources."

Prof Shepherd says hand contact is not the only way infections can be spread.

"It's certainly one of the routes but it's not the only one and we've shown through air sampling studies that these infections can be airborne as well and they can also be transmitted via door knobs, light switches, sinks and anything else that people touch."

Until now, though, little was known about the network routes which bugs use to spread among patients and staff.

"You can take everyone out of a ward and wheel in a machine that fumigates the whole place and puts it out of action for a week or so, which helps because it hits every nook and cranny, but you're using a hammer to crack a nut.

"But if you knew the three or four places in a ward to sterilise you could achieve much the same effect with less effort. It's the same as a spider's web," he explains, "if you cut a few critical links the whole web will fall apart and the mathematics of our model can find these links."

Prof Shepherd admits this is prevention rather than cure, but if he and his fellow researchers are right they could influence the future design of hospitals and how they are managed.

The next step is to apply for funding for a major study to put their theories to the test. They hope to use the university's new pathogen research chamber – the only one in the UK apart from a military test facility at Porton Down – which will allow them to mock-up a sealed hospital ward and conduct tests on MRSA, C.diff and TB.

"What we want to do ultimately is produce a system so ward managers can carry out the analysis themselves," he says. "If a hospital could observe everyone's movement on a ward and enter it into our model this would then come back highlighting those areas where the cleaning effort should be focused."

Not only could it save time and money, it could help to save lives.