After our summer break, I’m looking forward to our first Journal Club of the Autumn tomorrow (register here). I’ve written this post in preparation for the Journal Club, which is hosted by IPC Partners in partnership with IPC Launch, ID Watch, and the Healthcare Hygiene magazine on the topic “Optimizing prevention and treatment of gastrointestinal and urinary tract infections”. The paper that I’ll be covering is a randomised controlled trial of oral vancomycin to prevent recurrent C. difficile infection.
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Biofilms…the gift that keeps on giving!
Last week I spent some time at the Infection Prevention Society (IPS) annual conference in Birmingham which provided a fantastic selection of talks and discussions on current and emerging IPC challenges. One topic which came up time and time again was biofilms…. for example, whether the presence of biofilms provide Candida auris with the ability to persist in the clinical environment for prolonged periods, through to the role of biofilms in reduced susceptibility to disinfectants and antibiotics. It made me revisit an excellent recent review published in Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control, which is the topic of today’s blog and tomorrow’s IPC Journal Club (register here).
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Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control 