I’ve just return from a very pleasant couple of days at ICPIC in Geneva. One of the sessions there was about social medial for healthcare professionals. I’ve had a question on my mind for a while about conference tweeting – it’s good fun and helps me to remember stuff, but is it effective in sharing science outside of tight professional networks? Eli P flagged this fascinating paper, which provides evidence that Twitter can be a useful tool to share science outside of your professional network (‘outreaching’), but you need a certain threshold of followers to do it effectively.
Author: Jon Otter (@jonotter)
Oh, the fun you can have with a urinary catheter and a drain
We have blogged a fair bit recently about the risk of antibiotic-resistant Gram-negative bacterial contamination of sinks and drains. A new study offers a novel approach to this problem: by repurposing a balloon catheter to extend the duration of contact between a disinfectant and the sink-end of the pipe.
21 is the magic number (for defining CPE person-to-person transmission using WGS)
A fascinating study from a European research group has unravelled the molecular epidemiology of a large European collection of carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae clinical isolates. Most carbapenem resistance was due to an acquired carbapenemases, transmission clusters were common within and between hospitals, carbapenemase-producing isolates are more likely to spread in hospitals, and 21 SNPs is the magic number for defining CPE person-to-person transmission using WGS.
Are the robots taking over? The role of machine learning and AI in tackling infectious diseases
I attended a brilliant seminar at Imperial College last week on the role of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in infectious management, and to a lesser extent, infection prevention and control. There’s so much potential for this exciting technology to revolutionise the way we identify, treat, and prevent the spread of infectious diseases. But, there’s also some risks – some are already asking whether the robots are taking over, and whether that is an entirely good thing!
Getting to grips with healthcare-associated Gram-negative bloodstream infection
I did a Webber Teleclass today on GNBSI. I covered some background and epi, drivers of GNBSI, and how we can take positive steps to tackle GNBSI. Here’s my slides, with a summary below.
It (the flu) came from the desert
We tend to find that the flu season in Australia is an early predictor for the severity of the coming flu season in the Europe. And the early indications are the flu in Aus this year is bad – unprecedentedly bad. So, let’s get our flu vaccination campaign planning hats on!
Infectious disease epidemiology 101
I participated in Imperial College London’s school outreach programme by doing an intro to infectious disease epidemiology with a group of year 10-12 students (age 15-18) (you can download my slides here). It was hugely rewarding and highly recommended for anybody considering supporting this sort of work. The group were sharp, good fun, and asked good questions – and perhaps included one of the next generation of infectious disease epidemiologists?
What does good surgical wound closure look like?
I love and hate SSI prevention in equal measure. On the one hand, we have good evidence and strong guidelines around SSI prevention – but on the other hand, implementing these interventions to prevent SSI can be enormously tricky in practice. One key factor in preventing SSI is creating a well-closed wound in theatre. Surprisingly, there’s precious little data on how to measure what a well-closed surgical wound looks like. This qualitative study presents some potential indicators to measure good surgical wound closure in order to prevent SSI.
Make sure a (CPE) iceberg doesn’t sink your ship
An interesting modelling study has quantified the size of the CPE iceberg lurking under the water when CPE is only detected by clinical cultures and no active screening is done. And the CPE iceberg is larger than you may think!
The challenges of detecting colistin resistance in CPE
Colistin resistance in CPE is bad news. Colistin is an older antibiotic that has been effectively brought out of retirement to tackle CPE infections. We have first-hand experience of witnessing the emergence and spread of colistin resistance in CPE – and it’s not a pretty sight. Colistin susceptibility testing is very tricky from a diagnostic laboratory viewpoint – and so I was interested in this recently published paper from colleagues at Imperial evaluating a rapid MALDI-TOF based approach to detecting colistin resistance, which looks very promising indeed.
Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control 