Guest blogger Barley Chironda (bio below) writes…
IDWeek has become a cherished tradition for me, much like festivals and holidays, especially when food is involved. Attending this annual meeting for infectious disease health professionals every October and sharing my notes has become a bit of a ritual. This year, the meeting was held in Los Angeles, where the traditional red carpet was rolled out—not for Hollywood actors, but for experts in infectious diseases.
Continue readingThe Mpox outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continues, with the latest estimates suggesting that there have been >25,000 cases and >700 deaths since the beginning of 2023. There have been three cases of confirmed Clade Ib Mpox reported in the UK in the past week. I posted recently with some background info on the epi of Mpox. Today’s post is based on an epi modelling study exploring key epidemiological parameters of Clade I Mpox based on historical data to inform our understanding of the Clade Ib outbreak: the incubation period, serial interval, generation interval, and reproduction number. There will be an IPC Partners Journal Club on this study next week on Weds 13th November (register here).
Continue readingI was interested to read a randomised controlled trial of pulsed xenon UV (PX-UV) for room disinfection in Clinical Infectious Diseases. In this study, PX-UV was not associated with a reduction in HCAI. Some may be quick to say that this provides evidence that “automated room disinfection systems don’t work”, but there are important differences in the technologies involved as well as the usual strengths and limitations of the study methodology that could explain this outcome.
Continue readingThere has been a lot of excitement about the prospects of whole genome sequencing (WGS) to support infection prevention and control in a really meaningful way over the past decade or two. But to me this potential seems largely unfulfilled. WGS remains largely the domain of reference and research laboratories, and has not transitioned effectively to support IPC daily decision making. A recent review highlights the potential of WGS to support IPC, and identifies some of the barriers to be overcome if WGS really is to be a big part of our future in IPC.
Continue readingA fantastic new study from Brett Mitchell’s prolific group in Australia has recently been published in Lancet Infectious Diseases and the results are pretty spectacular. A fairly low cost intervention of an extra 3 hours of cleaning and disinfecting shared medical equipment each day resulted in a whopping 35% reduction in HCAI in a randomised controlled trial. I’m delighted to say that Prof Brett Mitchell will be introducing an IPC Journal Club on this study next Wednesday (register here).
Continue readingI gave an mpox webinar yesterday, to focus on the new threat from the Clade Ib outbreak of mpox currently going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has prompted the WHO to declare a public health emergency of international concern.
Continue readingAnother guest post from Dr Phil Norville (bio below)…
Very few weeks go by without me reading a paper discussing a multidrug-resistant outbreak that is linked to contaminated water or wastewater systems. The most recent was an outbreak of Achromobacter species in 22 patients which was linked to water in contaminated tubes of a medical pressurizer (used for urology surgery). It was one the reasons Jon and I wrote a letter to the Journal of Hospital Infection calling for a move towards the standardisation of wastewater sampling.
Continue readingI have posted before about the “postcode lottery” and it’s influence on rates of MRSA, affecting deprived postcodes (or zipcodes!) more than others. But this issue is wider than regional influence. On an international scale, your changes of a bad outcome from infectious disease varies, sometimes wildly, by where you happen to be in the world. A new article in CID on clinical outcomes from carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infections bears this out.
Continue readingRead an interesting study in JHI with a novel design that I thought I’d share. The study team evaluated the scale of COVID-19 outbreaks across three hospitals in Wales based on characteristics of the ward. When controlling for the things that you think might predict the scale of COVID-19 outbreaks (like speciality, number of toilets, patient age), the thing that came out as the biggest drive of outbreak size was how many patient transfers occurred into the ward. This suggests that the advice from “central command” to minimise patient moves made sense, and still makes sense to reduce the risk of transmissible infectious diseases in our hospitals.
Continue readingRemember all of those difficult decisions during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic? Which patient gets the ventilator? Who gets the single room? What has to stop to keep on top of the continuous flow of new SARS-CoV-2 results to investigate? Well, one of those difficult decisions was whether or not to continue with screening and contact precautions to prevent the spread of MRSA. A US team made a compelling “natural experiment” out of the discontinuation of screening and contact precautions for MRSA, showing that this was associated with an increased risk of MRSA HCAI.
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Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control 