Antimicrobials: Healthcare's Silver Bullet Against HAIs?

Rupp continues, “You have 100,000 deaths per year linked to HAIs, but how much money is earmarked and how many resources are dedicated at the federal or local levels that are aimed at these issues? When you talk to people at the NIH they say the CDC is supposed to take care of that and the CDC has never had an investigator-initiated research program. We are left in the middle of not having an adequate resource pool to help answer our questions. If you talk about the number of lives impacted by nosocomial infections, you don’t see people wearing colored ribbons or wristbands to draw attention to the problem of HAIs. People aren’t going on fun runs to generate money to fight HAIs. Instead, it’s this silent epidemic that we have not had the resources to address.”

Rupp says the fundamentals of infection prevention and control can get lost amidst the rush to adopt new technologies such as antimicrobials. “Many times what you see in the literature are studies related to gizmos because gizmos have financial resources behind them,” Rupp says. “That’s because a company is manufacturing them and they are willing to sponsor a small trial to gain credibility; the trials are often not designed to show a statistically significant impact on a meaningful infection. Instead surrogate markers for infection are sometimes targeted and extrapolations are made. We’re caught in the middle trying to judge what’s best for our patients. Furthermore, many of the most pressing issues don’t have anything to do with new devices – instead, they relate to influencing human behavior, education, and performance improvement – topics that have not received a lot of research support.”