Most people's daily briefings are mundane: some sales figures perhaps, a bit of staff news, an IT change. For Annette Jeanes, it is about life and death: the death of a person, the life of a bug. Her daily meeting with the hospital's microbiologists sounds like a list of everything you or I would hope never to meet. You may not understand the words, but you know they are bad.

There is a neutropenic with a bacillus and a cardiac arrest with a renal failure and a sensitive staph aureus. They have a case of typhoid or possibly meningococcus. The hospital is also hosting some mixed coliforms, MRSA, diarrhoea and aspergillus. And also, alarmingly, a dead anthrax victim on whom they have been asked to conduct a post mortem. “What's the point?” asked one consultant, worrying about the spores which could be released, “we know what it is.”

Standing in the way of all this, trying to hold back the tide of bugs: Annette Jeanes, nurse consultant and head of infection control - Aggy and Kim meets Dr Death.

“Sometimes your brain aches,” she admitted as we went down to the mortuary to check the anthrax victim, via the brand-new special baby unit, opened the previous day. The nurses were refusing to allow dirty old linen trolleys into it. Jeanes, a former intensive care nurse who has a master's in infection control, had spent the weekend air-testing the unit to ensure it was as clean as possible, and she wasn't happy either. “The ones I'm looking at, they look like they could get £50 on the Antiques Roadshow,” she protested in a phone call. “I'm sure you've done your best but these aren't good enough.”

Tiny babies lay still in their cots, a bundle of tubes and winking lights. She didn't even notice them. “It passes me by,” said Jeanes. “What's going through my mind is, are [the staff] doing everything they should be doing? Is it all clean? I'm doing a checklist. The edges of where infection begins and ends are very blurred.” I thought about the dirt we had just traipsed in on our shoes, after rushing through dirty London streets from site to site. This hospital has 6,500 staff.

Jeanes's phone rang, to alert her to the news that somebody with chicken pox had been sitting in X-ray without anybody realising. We popped down to the mortuary: Fernando Gómez, the bongo drum-maker who died last month after inhaling anthrax spores in animal skins, was still there, post mortem completed at the request of the coroner. The specimens were on their way to Porton Down.

If part of the job is charging from building to building, dispensing advice, admonitions and alcohol hand gel, a large portion is also the more mundane business of meetings.

Jeanes's deputy, Pietro, a statistician, unveiled a complicated model predicting the bed occupancy rate needed to abolish hospital-acquired infection. A bit like the NHS as a whole, it worked beautifully in theory. Part of the fight against superbugs is statistical. A patient previously at UCLH had turned up at the Whittington Hospital and developed MRSA, and the Whittington was asking UCLH to record it as one of theirs. Jeanes was not having it: the patient had been in a nursing home in between, so she didn't have to accept it on her books.

There was a meeting about a new poster campaign, and another with a scientist developing a cleaning product, based on copper, which seems set to replace the ubiquitous alcohol hand gel. Jeanes and her chief clinical ally, Dr Vanya Gant, a consultant in microbiology and infection, are excited about the new gel's potential: it has a far longer-lasting effect on surfaces and, unlike alcohol gel, can also kill C difficile spores. This may not set your heart racing, but it's big news in the superbug world.

Dr Gant says things like this: “The average hospital bug is capable of dividing once every 17 minutes. Leave one bug to divide over a weekend with all the food and water it needs, and by Tuesday morning it will exceed the weight of the known universe.”

In America, half of staphylococcus infections that end up in hospital are MRSA and half of those is a strain that has 40 per cent mortality, no matter what your age. “It's out there. It's circulating in high schools, in sports teams, in prison, but it's coming here.”

Completely supportive of Jeanes, he said other staff regard her as a “rock-eating bitch”. (“That's true,” she replied. “I don't mind.”) “We have people with world-class skills,” said Dr Gant. “These people are world leaders, very often they are unique and to a certain degree they spin around their own axis with justification. So when we come along and say, ‘great surgery, mate, wash your hands' - you get the point.”

On the way to the neurology hospital to check whether some scaffolders had cleaned up their mess - “dust will carry things such as aspergillus and skin cells” - Jeanes worried over a TB case. The patient was in intensive care, had been treated, but was still testing positive. “They keep telling me, ‘this is really fascinating'. All I want to know is, what are we doing about it and is there a risk to other patients?”

Finally we dropped down to A&E, where the trolley-cleaning had recently been contracted out and Jeanes wanted to check that it was being done properly. “I don't think [ministers] really understand how difficult it is to clean a hospital. I think they have a fairly simplistic view of it which is probably what the public has, that you keep it clean like your own home. They don't understand the massive throughput in hospitals and how difficult it can be to get to an area and clean. For example, if someone's dying and the relatives have all rushed in, the cleaner doesn't want to push them away.”

In A&E we found Lina, a worried young Bulgarian girl who had been working there for a week and was taking the job extremely seriously. Jeanes went through the process in minute detail - do not soak the cloth too much, never use chlorine with microfibre, change cloth from trolley to trolley - and the cleaner became indignant. “The problem is, they are not bringing me new one. They give me one of these for whole day.” And Jeanes was off again, to find the girl's reluctant supervisor and force her to hand over a whole packet. If they could hear the daily briefing, they wouldn't be scrimping on those cloths.

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