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Dramatic progress in reducing several major health care associated infections (HAIs) in recent years has been offset by the unrelenting rise of Clostridium difficile, the spore-forming pathogen that can cling steadfast to hands even after washing with soap and water.
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Conceding that the effectiveness of risk-based hepatitis C virus testing has plateaued, public health officials are rolling the dashboard dice to capture the grand-daddy of all birth cohorts: Baby Boomers.
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As the nation faces the largest outbreak of pertussis in 50 years, the rate of vaccination of health care workers languishes at about 20%.
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This influenza immunization season may be one of the most challenging for the nation's hospitals as they face a new requirement to track every employee, licensed practitioner, student and volunteer.
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The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) appears to be taking a step back from its recent emphasis on injection safety issues in ambulatory care and surgical settings (ASCs), though noting that some 3,200 inspections done in fiscal years 2010 and 2011 "found that deficient infection control practices are widespread in ASCs," according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
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David MZ, Medvedev S, Hohmann SF, et al. Increasing burden of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus hospitalizations at US Academic Medical Centers 2003-2008. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2012;33:782-9.
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A North Carolina hospital's program to restrict ciprofloxacin use in intensive care units was associated with a significant decreasing trend of Pseudomonas aeruginosa resistant isolates.
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From November 2003 to November 2005, 254 cases of childhood diarrhea and 452 age- and geographically-matched (by zip code) controls were enrolled in a case-control study of the etiology of acute diarrhea among children 10-49 months of age presenting to a pediatric emergency department.
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At Duke University Health System, a tertiary-care medical center that has traditionally provided aggregated antimicrobial susceptibility data from both adult and pediatric isolates, antibiograms for Escherichia coli isolates from children ¡Ü12 years of age from July 2009 to September 2010 were developed and compared with antibiograms that combined adult and pediatric data. A total of 375 pediatric isolates were obtained from 327 patients.
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An investigation initiated after a clinician reported to the Tennessee Department of Health on September 18, 2012 the case of a patient who developed meningitis due to Aspergillus fumigatus after having received an epidural corticosteroid injection at an ambulatory surgical center quickly identified a number of other suspect cases.