Hospital Infection Control & Prevention – September 1, 2021
September 1, 2021
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Game Changer: COVID-19 Delta Variant Breaks Through in Provincetown
The Provincetown, MA, COVID-19 outbreak in July made headlines because hundreds of fully vaccinated people had breakthrough infections. The critical question is whether the Provincetown outbreak is more of an outlier, or is it a harbinger of the kind of outbreaks and vaccine breakthroughs we may see more often with the highly transmissible delta variant?
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Bacteriophages: Strange Viruses that Eat Bacteria for Breakfast
For an American couple, it began with a dream trip to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. It turned into the curse of the pharaohs. The husband developed a pan-resistant Gram-negative infection that turned septic.
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CDC: Resistance Emerging to Last-Line Carbapenem Drugs
Carbapenems are a last-line antibiotic, one of the final weapons in the formulary against multidrug-resistant bacteria. But the ever-evolving bugs are starting to solve this drug class and have found an ingenious way to do it — genetic transfer of resistant properties to another Gram-negative bacterium.
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IP Cuts SSIs by 55%, Saves a Net $805,000
A hospital saved a tidy sum and left 10 patients much happier — those who did not have surgical site infections (SSIs), as predicted by the SSI rate prior to an intervention that revamped the patient preparation protocol. -
Reducing Immediate-Use Steam Sterilization
Once called “flash sterilization,” the practice of quickly sterilizing a surgical instrument and returning it to the sterile field now is called immediate-use steam sterilization (IUSS). Regardless of the name, it generally has been been discouraged if used as a substitute for lack of sufficient supplies or to save time for a non-emergency reason.
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Reinfection: COVID-19 Vaccine Twice as Effective as Antibodies
COVID-19 vaccination is more than twice as protective as circulating antibodies in people who had a prior infection with SARS-CoV-2, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.
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C. auris Can Be Stopped, but Not Easily
A superbug that can become pan-resistant to fungal drugs, Candida auris first was reported in the United States in 2013 and continues to spread and cause hospital outbreaks.