This document can also be found on the official website of the World Health Organisation at: http://www.who.int. These guidelines, jointly prepared by the WHO Regional Offices for SouthEast Asia and the Western Pacific, should help countries to strengthen their infection control practices in health care facilities. This would help to prevent further spread of infection and to deal effectively with new infectious diseases like SARS as well as other hospital-associated infections. The guidelines address all aspects of an infection control programme with special attention being paid to SARS. The specific objectives of these guidelines are to provide directions and information in relation to facilities, equipment, and procedures necessary to implement standard and additional (transmission-based) precautions for control of infections, cleaning, disinfecting and reprocessing of reusable equipment, waste management, protection of health care workers from transmissible infections, and infection control practices in special situations. This resource is part of the collection "--". Collections are monitored daily and new content is added.