Nice paper this week in JAMA Internal Medicine. How to treat patients hospitalized with Community-Acquired Pneumonia (CAP)? Antibiotics, sure, but can you do more to improve outcome and shorten length of stay (LOS)? You could choose any of 4 evidence-based interventions, that, according to (Cochrane) meta-analyses, improve patient outcome. Or decide to include all 4 in a bundle, as the Australian investigators did. And then the bundle fails to provide benefit and increases harm. Valentijn Schweitzer and I tried to explain. Continue reading
How a bundle kills Cochrane – or not?
Nice paper this week in JAMA Internal Medicine. How to treat patients hospitalized with Community-Acquired Pneumonia (CAP)? Antibiotics, sure, but can you do more to improve outcome and shorten length of stay? You could choose any of 4 evidence-based interventions, that, according to (Cochrane) meta-analyses, improve patient outcome. Or decide to include all 4 in a bundle, as the Australian investigators did. And then the bundle fails to provide benefit and increases harm. Valentijn Schweitzer and I tried to explain. Continue reading
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.
Studying bacteriophages: catch-22
As posted previously, bacteriophage therapy is making a remarkable come-back, if measured in media attention. It is portrayed as safe and effective in treating infections where antibiotics fail. Yet, well-designed controlled studies either lack or failed to demonstrate benefits. All we have are case reports, with – with no exception – spectacular results. But that doesn’t make bacteriophages part of our daily options for treatment. And thus, desperate patients pay thousands of euros for bacteriophages in Georgia, Poland and Belgium for self-treatment, while – at the same time – all of us seem to agree that efficacy and safety should be determined. Continue reading
The war against CPE
An interesting publication on the control of CPE last week. Not in Nature, Science of Journal of Hospital Infection, but in the “Staatsblad van het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden”. The paper, “Besluit van 26 april 2019, houdende aanpassing van het Besluit publieke gezondheid vanwege een meldingsplicht voor Carbapenemaseproducerende Enterobacteriaceae”, with King Willem-Alexander as first author, implies that on April 26th it was decided that from July 1st 2019 on, by law, all CPE detected in the Netherlands must be notified, see. A next step in our war against CPE.
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 