Hospital Infection Control & Prevention
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Antibiotic Stewardship: A Little Goes A Long Way
With antibiotic stewardship programs now critical to preserve fading drug efficacy, it’s good to know that even small efforts can yield considerable bang for the buck.
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Ebola Outbreak Sustained by Superspreaders
Prior to the epic Ebola outbreak of 2014-2015, the prevailing dogma was that the virus was not a pandemic threat because it killed its victims too quickly to sustain itself in a prolonged outbreak. That myth was certainly exploded, and now we have one clue as to why: “superspreaders.”
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The Joint Commission Will Cite for Powdered Gloves
As previously reported in Hospital Infection Control & Prevention, the FDA has banned1 the use of all powdered gloves in healthcare due to latex allergies and other issues.
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IDSA Issues New Guidelines on Brain Infections
In new guidelines1 on healthcare-associated ventriculitis and meningitis following surgery, the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) calls for a collaborative approach to prevent and detect complex infections with a high percentage of adverse outcomes for patients.
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Will Vaccine Critics Be Emboldened?
Beneath all the bombast of the current political climate, there is one issue that has gained relatively little national attention but is of great concern to public health advocates – a reenergized attack on vaccine safety. Longtime vaccine safety critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and actor Robert DeNiro recently offered a $100,000 prize to anyone that can prove vaccines are safe.
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ANA Prepares for Return of Ebola – or Anything Else
It seems like only yesterday — and we can certainly be thankful it wasn’t — that many U.S. hospitals and healthcare workers felt unprepared to deal with a potential incoming case of Ebola linked to the outbreak in Western Africa.
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CDC: Zika Virus Will Hit U.S. Again as Weather Warms
Any hopes that Zika virus would strike and disappear like SARS and other episodic infectious disease outbreaks have been dashed by the CDC. Zika is fully expected be a mosquito-borne infection threat in the U.S. as the warmer months arrive, primarily in the form of a horrific panoply of birth defects to infants born to infected mothers.
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Fatal Infection Resistant to All Antibiotics
Last August a female patient in an acute care hospital in Reno, NV, died of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae that was resistant to 26 antibiotics. The pathogen was Klebsiella pneumoniae that was isolated from a wound specimen. Of note, the patient had recently been hospitalized in India, and the specific enzyme conferring pan resistance was first discovered in that country: New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase.
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MRSA Screening Has Collateral Benefits
Lead author Martin E. Evans, MD, an infectious disease physician at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, reports that infection rates fell 80% percent in non-ICUs, and 81% percent in spinal cord injury units.
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Wanted: The Next Generation of Infection Preventionists
A national survey of 4,078 infection preventionists shows that the field is approaching a demographic cliff, as 41.6% of respondents were age 56 years or older.