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The dramatic reduction of Clostridium difficile infections (CDI) in hospitals in the United Kingdom is putting considerable pressure on American infection preventionists and health care epidemiologists to follow suit with similar success.
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Dr. Baron is a stockholder for Cepheid, and Immunogenetics, is Director of Medical Affairs for Cepheid, and is on the Scientific Advisory Board for OpGen, Immunogenetics, and NanoMR. She is co-founder of the Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program (www.dmdp.org), a non-profit organization that does laboratory capacity building in the developing world.
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A recently published study by investigators led by Clostridium difficile expert Dale Gerding, MD, found that soap and water hand washing widely recommended to remove the spore-forming pathogen is surprisingly ineffective.
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While the exorbitant costs of health care associated infections (HAIs) have been repeatedly cited as a prime reason for prevention second only to the higher calling of patient safety an inconvenient truth was recently revealed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Looking at central line related bloodstream infections which kill some 28,000 patients annually they found a disturbing disincentive to prevent CLABSIs at the very heart of the health care system profit.
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Infection preventionists must raise a common voice in support of the measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccine to overcome the misplaced fears and false information that have led to recurrent outbreaks in unvaccinated populations, an IP urged recently in Fort Lauderdale, FL at the 40th annual meeting of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).
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It is an unfortunate sign of the times that recurrent injection safety lapses and hepatitis outbreaks have reached the point where public health officials felt it necessary to create a toolkit to guide notification and follow-up of patients potentially exposed to bloodborne pathogens.
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Despite all the accolades and academic honors, Nathan Wolfe, PhD, is disarmingly down to a very different Earth one teeming with microbes that are ever interacting with animals and man.
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What if HIV had been detected in the small human populations where it first appeared, African bushmeat hunters who were likely infected with the novel retrovirus decades before it struck the United States and spread globally in the 1980s? How many of the 25 million people who have died of AIDS would have remained uninfected because the virus had been identified by scientists in the field?
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In 2006, the CDC recommended routine, voluntary HIV testing for persons aged 13-64 in all health care settings, with elimination of separate informed consent5 and this recommendation has basically now been adopted by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.