It probably has not escaped your attention that it’s World Hand Hygiene Day tomorrow, on the 5th of May. This year, it’s a double-header focussing on hand hygiene and sepsis, under the theme: “Sepsis – it’s in your hands.” But, which is the ‘Cinderella’ Moment for Hand Hygiene? Moment 5, of course: following contact with the patient environment.
There have been a few important updates on the prevention and control of MDR-GNR from ECCMID, here in Madrid. I thought I’d share a couple of key reflections.
I was recently browsing through the HCAI mandatory reporting data in England (as you do) and noticed that the increasing trend in E. coli BSIs and MSSA BSIs seems to be following a similar trajectory. Could the drivers of these two distinctly different organisms be similar?
I did a talk today in Portugal covering the nine decades since Fleming discovered the effects of Penicillium sp. in 1928. I thought it would be interesting to have two endings to the talk: an upbeat one, and a doomsday one.
I posted recently on the potential risk of CPE contamination of sinks, drains, and hospital wastewater. The question in my mind then was whether contamination is a smoking gun or innocent bystander regarding CPE transmission? What we really need is an intervention to show that better management of sinks and drains results in reduce CPE transmission. And now, we have one! The findings suggest that attempts to control CPE will go down the drain if we don’t intervene to improvement the management of sinks and drains.
I was asked to do a talk today on the modes of CPE transmission at a PHE Workshop on tackling CPE. It caused me to do a lot of thinking and write a new presentation, so I thought I’d share. You can download the slides here.
A Swiss study has found that the mean cost of a contact precautions day is £130. This is useful in helping us to understand the financial impact of infection prevention and HCAI.
A recent US study has investigated CPE contamination of sinks, drains, and wastewater. Carbapenemase-producing bacteria were identified throughout the drainage and water system, from drains in patient rooms, right through to wastewater sampled through manholes adjacent to the hospital. My main question in all of this is whether this huge reservoir of carbapenemases in hospital wastewater is a risk for patients. The lack of genetic similarity between isolates in hospital wastewater and isolates from patients suggest not, but I suspect there’s an indirect link and these carbapenemases find their way into isolates affecting humans, which is supported by genetic links between the plasmids carrying the carbapenemases.
WHO have published the first report of the Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (GLASS) network. GLASS was launched a couple of years ago to try and address the massive black hole in our knowledge of global AMR resistance rates. The extensive report details progress to date, focussing on which countries have established surveillance systems, and how the initial data looks (which you can also view via an online database).
Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control 