I was privileged to speak at the Healthcare Infection Society meeting in France today on ‘What’s trending in the infection prevention and control literature? HIS 2012 -> HIS 2014’. You can download my slides here, and view the recording below:

I have always enjoyed attending these light-hearted summary sessions at other conferences, so I hope I struck the right tone. In order to track some of the trends in the infection prevention and control literature since the last HIS conference (in late 2012), I plugged some search terms into Google trends (Figure).

Figure: Google Trends for all search terms (excluding viruses) (2004 to present). Logos and arrows represent the time of the HIS 2012 and HIS 2014 conferences. Search terms: hospital cleaning; carbapenem resistant Enterobacteriaceae, whole genome sequencing, fecal microbiota transplantation. [Note, I had to spell it ‘wrong’ (fecal v faecal) to detect a trend. Blasted Americans.]

Based on my search terms, there was one infection control trend that trumped all others: Ebola. If I include in with the other Google search terms, it eclipses all others! Whilst trends in Google searches may not necessarily correlate with trends in the infection prevention and control literature, in this case, it is true that the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa has prompted a lot of publications in the literature – and consumed an awful lot of professional time for all who are connected with hospital infection prevention and control! Aside from Ebola, other trends in the infection prevention and control literature that I covered include MERS-CoV, universal vs. targeted interventions, faecal microbiota transplantation, whole genome sequencing, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), and some aspects of environmental science. Finally, I looked into my crystal ball and predict some of the trends in the infection prevention and control literature by the time HIS 2016 comes around.