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Empowering nurses and other clinicians to speak up when they perceive a patient safety problem may be the most important component of emerging new programs designed to drive infection rates to zero, emphasizes Sara Cosgrove, MD, hospital epidemiologist at John Hopkins in Baltimore.
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Having worked with a "physician champion" and greatly lowered infection rates by adopting an industrial process model, an infection control professional has joined the chorus that say infections are not an inevitable byproduct of medical care.
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It may seem intuitive, even obvious to experienced ICPs, but acquiring an infection during hospitalization is about as bad as it gets for a patient. Even patients with a host of maladies that compromise their recovery fared significantly better in outcomes than patients who acquired infections.
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Health care-associated infections (HAIs) have traditionally been viewed with a certain air of epidemiological inevitability, seen in many cases as the unpreventable result of keeping very sick patients alive via invasive devices and other medical interventions.
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Drug Labels A Prescription for Misunderstanding?; Beta-Blockers and Depression Unlinked?; FDA Actions
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The Non-nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase inhibitors (nnRTI's) including both efavirenz and nevirapine have intrinsic in vitro activity superior to all the other classes of antiretroviral agents. Clinical trials including patients who have been followed now for many years on efavirenz have demonstrated the durability, as well as potency, of these agents.
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Community-Associated MRSA (CA-MRSA) has emerged as an important cause of skin and soft-tissue infection. Most isolates of CA-MRSA are positive for the Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL), an exotoxin that is generally absent from "classic" hospital-associated MRSA strains. This suggests that PVL may be an important virulence determinant in CA-MRSA.
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The new quadrivalent Human Papillomavirus (HPV) L1 virus-like particle vaccine (types 6, 11, 16, 18) was studied for immunogenicity and reactogenicity in 506 girls and 510 boys (10-15 years of age) and 513 young women (16-23 years of age). Vaccine was administered in the standard schedule of 0, 2, and 6 months. Type-specific serologies were performed in a blinded fashion using a competitive Luminex xMAP-based immunoassay (cLIA) on serum samples obtained at 0, 3, and 7 months.
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Of 696 episodes of community-acquired meningitis in adults identified by the nationwide Dutch Meningitis Cohort study from 1998 to 2002, 30 (4%) were due to Listeria monocytogenes. The mean age was 65 ± 18 years; all 10 of the previously immunocompetent patients were >50 years of age.
