News & Views

When it comes to the examination room at your healthcare clinic, you might think that avoiding catching the flu or other more deadly viruses is out of your hands, so to speak. But infectious disease experts at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), who just published a practical guide for infectious…

Hand hygiene is the foundation of infection prevention, but often doesn’t get the same attention as other factors. While one could argue that hand hygiene isn’t the most exciting infection control intervention, it can have the biggest impact on reducing healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and is the only intervention that can impact all types of HAIs.…

Infection preventionists have a tough job. It’s not easy to change processes in organizations as complex as hospitals. It’s not easy to change the behavior of hundreds of clinicians and hospital staff. While everyone has the same goal in mind – keeping patients safe and making them well – thousands of individual actions taken every…

Introducing a less convenient option for hand sanitizing may actually boost workers’ use of hand sanitizer and increase sanitary conditions in the workplace, according to findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings revealed that employees in a food factory used more of their regular sanitizer and had cleaner…

Many outbreaks due to Serratia marcescens among neonates have been described in the literature but little is known about the role of whole genome sequencing in outbreak analysis and management. Zingg, et al. (2017) report that between February and March 2013, two neonates and two infants previously hospitalized in the neonatal unit of a tertiary…

Now in its 11th year, the IPS Conference gathers leading experts from across Europe and beyond. Wilcox’s 30-minute presentation is based on the multicentre study he led in France, Italy and UK, exploring the prevalence of environmental contamination – including by antibiotic resistant bacteria – in hospital toilets used by visitors, staff and patients according…

Colds and the flu are among the most frequent reasons people miss work or school. Adults average two or three colds a year, and as much as 20 percent of the U.S. population gets influenza every flu season. (1) There is no cure for the common cold or the flu, but most cases can be…

Waking up before Christmas, a health department team on Tuesday raided two well-known bakeries in central. The officials later decided to serve notices on the owners of these bakeries, asking them to keep the factory premises clean and train the staffers engaged in preparing items, including Christmas cakes. Apart from these, notices will also be sent to 16…

A new approach to outpatient hand washing involving patient and physician co-washing may increase hand washing, according to a study published in the Annals of Family Medicine. Gregory A. Doyle, MD, from West Virginia University in Morgantown, and colleagues tested a new approach involving patient and physician hand washing. Clinicians offered sanitizer to the patient…

For effective hand hygiene, water temperature matters less than time, according to a study published in the Journal of Food Protection. Researchers contaminated the hands of volunteers with high levels of a harmless bacteria several times over six months. The participants were then asked to wash their hands in 60-degree, 79-degree or 100-degree water. The…