Relatively uncommon in the United States before 2000, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) continue a dramatic increase in health care settings, moving across the health care continuum and causing infections that are difficult to treat and have high mortality, the Centers for…
Patients who tested positive for carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) took an average of 387 days following hospital discharge clear of the organism, according to a new study published in the current issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of…
Past studies have linked contact precautions with adverse health events like patients developing delirium, increased risk of falls, or pressure ulcers. Now we have a new study on the effects of contract precautions on patient care that poses something of…
Sometimes, things in motion, even if a tragic result can be reasonably imagined, cannot be stopped or slowed. Consider rising antibiotic resistance or climate change. Concerning the latter, filmmaker James Cameron took as a metaphor the subject of his epic…
While drug resistant health care associated infections (HAIs) have been a source of increasing alarm in recent years, the problem of declining antibiotic efficacy is also occurring in infections that could potentially have broad implications for public health: sexually transmitted…
Patient-to-patient transmission of the so-called New Delhi strain of carabapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) in a Rhode Island hospital was recently reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Clinicians caring for patients infected with such organisms have few, if any,…
The suddenly white-hot issue of antibiotic stewardship is not a new idea by any means, so it comes as something of a surprise to note that the first multicenter study testing a single intervention was recently published.(1) The first of…
Antibiotic stewardship – while labeled as the last-ditch stand to stave off a post-antibiotic era – actuaully can begin on a fairly mundane level. Sort of like realizing it now costs more than a penny to make a penny, but…
Infectious disease societies frustrated at watching antimicrobial resistance increase for decades are taking the unusual step of asking for federal regulation and oversight of clinical practice, imploring the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to require hospitals to implement…
With the misuse and overuse of antibiotics driving drug resistance in general and emerging Clostridium difficile in particular, infection preventionists and health care epidemiologists want to have a greater role in antimicrobial stewardship programs. It may seem surprising that this…