(Press-News.org) (SALT LAKE CITY)--By coordinating with state health departments and communicating with each other about patients with C. difficile and antibiotic-resistant infections, hospitals, long-term acute-care facilities and nursing homes could reduce the number of such hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) by an estimated 619,000 cases in the next five years, a new Centers for Disease Control 9 (CDC)-led report has found.
As highlighted in the CDC's monthly Vital Signs monthly report, published on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2015, mathematical modeling was used to project the number of infections due to carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) when hospital and skilled nursing facilities act independently to enhance infection controls and when they work together in a coordinated response in mathematical models of a generic 10-facility health care network and a 102-facility network in Orange County, Calif. Compared with the independent approach, the coordinated 10-facility model showed CRE infections could be reduced by 74 percent over five years. The 102-facility network model showed CREs could be reduced by 55 percent compared to the independent approach.
"Antibiotic-resistant infections in health care settings are a growing threat in the U.S., killing tens of thousands of people each year," says CDC Director Tom Frieden, M.D., MPH. "New CDC modeling shows that we can dramatically reduce these infections if health care facilities, nursing homes and public health departments work together to improve antibiotic use and infection control so patients are protected."
Two-Part Approach
The report recommends a coordinated, two-part approach to turn this data into action that prevents illness and saves lives:
1. Public health departments track and alert health care facilities to drug-resistant germs outbreaks in their area and the threat of germs from other facilities
2. Health care facilities work together and with public health authorities to implement shared infection control actions to stop the spread of antibiotic-resistant germs and C. difficile between facilities
C. difficile is a bacterium that grows in the gut. In individuals exposed to antibiotics, it can cause an illness that ranges from mild to life threatening, with symptoms that include diarrhea, abdominal pain, fever and blood or pus in stool. The most dangerous antibiotic resistant bacteria acquired in hospitals include CRE, MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), and resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa. These bacteria can cause sepsis, pneumonia, and other types of life-threatening infections.
C. diff and antibiotic-resistant bacteria are spread from patient to patient within hospitals or nursing homes and when patients are transferred from one health care facility to another. For this study, the CDC used a mathematical model developed by physicians and researchers from the University of Utah School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Salt Lake City Health Care System.
The researchers developed a model that shows how coordination among facilities could reduce CRE infections over the course of five years after the drug-resistant bacteria enters a network of 10 generic health care facilities. The model projected the spread of CRE infections based on different intervention scenarios run thousands of times, according to Matthew H. Samore, M.D., University of Utah professor and chief of the Division of Epidemiology, director of the Center of Innovation (IDEAS Center) at the VA Salt Lake City Health Care System and a senior co-author on the study.
"This modeling shows the advantages of a coordinated strategy to prevent the spread of antibiotic-resistant infections," Samore says. "The actual effectiveness of any intervention is going to depend on a number of factors. But the modeling shows that communication and sharing of information among facilities is much more effective than the standard approach of hospitals and nursing facilities acting independently to stop spread of resistant bacteria."
The 10-facility model showed that the coordinated strategy resulted in an estimated 400 CRE acquisitions over five years. This compares with 2,100 CRE acquisitions under the current approach to reducing those infections, and 1,600 cases of CRE when health care facilities acted independently to enhance infection control.
Forward-Looking
Beth Bell, M.D., MPH, director of the CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, says this Vital Signs report is forward-looking in its coordinated response. "We must transform our public health to turn the tide," she says. "The President's FY 2016 budget would accelerate efforts to strengthen our response and improve antibiotic stewardship in health care facilities."
University of Utah epidemiologists are working with the Utah Department of Health to control the spread of HAIs and CREs. Jeanmarie Mayer, M.D., U associate professor of internal medicine and chief epidemiologist for University of Utah Health Care Hospital and Clinics, serves as chair of the Utah Healthcare Infection Prevention Governance Committee, which works with the state health department on a number of avenues regarding HAIs and CREs. These include recommending ways to improve communications between health care facilities regarding patients with CREs and surveillance of the infections.
Utah State Epidemiologist Allyn Nakashima, M.D., says documented cases of CREs must be reported to the Utah Department of Health, and this year the state will begin collecting data from medical laboratories regarding CREs. In a pilot program, the state developed a patient transfer form facilities can use to alert each other regarding patients with CREs. The pilot study found that when individual health care facilities take time to use it, the form is effective.
INFORMATION:
Along with Samore, the other Utah co-authors on the report are: Damon J.A. Toth, Ph.D., Windy Tanner, Ph.D., Karim Khader, Ph.D., Kevin Brown, Ph.D., William Ray, and Michael Rubin, M.D., Ph.D., all Division of Epidemiology, and Fred Adler, Ph.D., Department of Mathematics.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine, developed the 102-facility mathematical model.
This news release is available in Japanese.
Astronomers using the Subaru Telescope's Hyper Suprime-Cam prime-focus camera recently observed the nearby large spiral galaxy M81, together with its two brightest neighbors, M82 and NGC3077. The results of their observations are deep, super wide-field images of the galaxies and their populations of young stars. As part of a Galactic Archaeology study, the team discovered that the spatial distribution of the young stars around these galaxies follows very closely that of their distribution of neutral hydrogen. "This ...
Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have cooled a gas to the quietest state ever achieved, hoping to detect faint quantum effects lost in the din of colder but noisier fluids.
While the ultracold gas's temperature - a billionth of a degree above absolute zero - is twice as hot as the record cold, the gas has the lowest entropy ever measured. Entropy is a measure of disorder or noise in a system; a record low temperature gas isn't necessarily the least noisy.
"This 'lowest entropy' or 'lowest noise' condition means that the quantum gas can be used to ...
Glenview, Ill. (August 4, 2015)--Researchers have found the risk for hospital readmission to be nearly three times higher after COPD exacerbation if a follow-up visit to a pulmonologist is skipped. The Israeli study published today in the journal CHEST The Association Between Hospital Readmission and Pulmonologist Follow-up Visits in Patients With COPD examined the impact of a pulmonologist follow-up visit during the month after discharge from the hospital on reducing readmissions.
COPD exacerbations account for 500,000 hospital admissions and $18 billion in direct health-care ...
Glenview, Ill. (August 4, 2015) -- A case study published in the August issue of the journal CHEST found lenalidomide treatments may have an immediate effect in the treatment of sarcoidosis-related symptoms. Sarcoidosis, a disease that involves abnormal collections of inflammatory cells that can form nodules in various organs, can affect individuals from all racial and age groups. To date, no optimal therapies have been effective in managing this condition.
This finding was reported in the case of a 71-year-old woman with a long-standing history of refractory pulmonary ...
An expanded program of treatment for hypertension could prevent about 800,000 cardiovascular disease (CVD) events every year in China, according to a modeling study published this week in PLOS Medicine. The predictions of this simulation, reported by Andrew Moran of Columbia University and colleagues, indicate that such a program should also be borderline cost-effective, provided low cost essential anti-hypertensive drugs are used.
Hypertension is the leading cardiovascular risk factor in China, the world's most populous country. About 325 million adults in China have ...
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS- Marketers would love to get inside the consumer brain. And now they can. Researchers at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see if what people say about brands matches what they are actually thinking.
In their paper, "From 'Where' to 'What': Distributed Representations of Brand Associations in the Human Brain (Journal of Marketing Research: August 2015, Vol. 52, No. 4), co-authors Ming Hsu and Leif Nelson, Berkeley-Haas marketing professors, and Yu-Ping ...
While most people might know some algae as "pond scum," to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), they are tiny organisms that could provide a source of sustainable fuels. Like plants, they can convert light into energy-rich chemical compounds; unlike plants, they require less space and don't need arable soil to grow.
Some algae like Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (or "Chlamy," as it's known to its large research community) produce energy-dense oils or lipids when stressed, and these lipids can then be converted into fuels. However, researchers walk a fine line in not killing ...
Most robots on a factory floor are fairly ham-handed: Equipped with large pincers or claws, they are designed to perform simple maneuvers, such as grabbing an object, and placing it somewhere else in an assembly line. More complex movements, such as adjusting the grasp on an object, are still out of reach for many industrial robots.
Engineers at MIT have now hit upon a way to impart more dexterity to simple robotic grippers: using the environment as a helping hand. The team, led by Alberto Rodriguez, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and graduate student ...
Washington, DC-Even before a child is conceived, the parents' exposure to environmental stressors can alter the way genes are expressed and ultimately harm the child's health when those genes are passed down to the next generation, according to a new article published in the Endocrine Society's journal Endocrinology.
Exposure to environmental stressors such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals, psychological stress and malnutrition may result in disadvantageous epigenetic "reprogramming" that can echo through multiple generations. When these stressors disrupt early developmental ...
WASHINGTON D.C., August 4, 2015 -- The following articles are freely available online from Physics Today, the world's most influential and closely followed magazine devoted to physics and the physical science community.
You are invited to read, share, blog about, link to, or otherwise enjoy:
1) IS PHYSICS RESEARCH ANOTHER CASUALTY OF UKRAINIAN CONFLICT?
David Kramer of Physics Today discusses the negative impact that the conflict in eastern Ukraine has had on physicists and students forced to relocate from their homes and universities.
"More than 25 universities and ...
