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Usually if you're anywhere near a hospital you see doctors and other medical staff coming and going in their scrubs: running errands, heading to the subway, and sometimes sitting in restaurants for long lunches.

Some experts say this is more than a "fashion don't," but a major risk to the public and the patients they serve.

"They're carrying deadly, drug-resistant germs out of the hospital and into a restaurant," says Betsy McCaughey of the Committee to Reduce Infectious Deaths. "And it's particularly a concern because of a new germ threat called clostridium dificile, or C-dif for short. It's a germ that you ingest."

"So say someone comes from the hospital and sits in this restaurant and touches the booth and deposits the germs on the booth, and then you come in and you sit down and touch that booth and then pick up your sandwich. You're ingesting a deadly germ," continues McCaughey. "It can make you very sick."

Because of growing concerns about hospital infections and drug-resistant bacteria, more hospitals have boosted efforts to make sure doctors and other medical personnel regularly wash hands, and have put in place other infection control procedures. But there are no across-the-board guidelines on what hospitals should do about the clothing their employees wear.

There's no solid research on the role clothing may play in the spread of hospital infections, but a lot of research suggests soiled scrubs are harbingers of dangerous germs.

Already doctors and staff at Beth Israel Medical Center have taken the step of "color-coding" their scrubs, wearing only purple scrubs in the operating rooms and surgical suites that are not allowed outside the hospital.

"Everything we do here is about three things: quality, safety, and customer service," says Dr. Donald Kastenbaum of Beth Israel Medical Center. "When it comes to quality about the patient's well-being, we decided we didn't want people in operating rooms subjected to surgeons, staff that were coming into the hospital in scrubs of any kind."

McCaughey says for your protection, all hospitals should provide workers with clean uniforms.

"The Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths has called on hospitals all around the city to provide freshly-laundered uniforms for their workers and bar them from wearing things outside the hospital," she says. "This is the standard of hygiene in the United Kingdom, in many Scandinavian countries, countries that are eradicating infection. And it should be the standard of care here."