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Q:  We reprocess vaginal specs for some local doctors' offices. I recently learned that once the office staff receives the instruments, they are then opening up the individual sterile peel pouches and then place the “unprotected” vaginal speculums into the exam table to be ready for use by the provider. Is there anything we can purchase to use for transportation purposes that will save us time and money and skip the sterilization process of these items?A:  This is an excellent question, especially with many sterile processing departments (SPDs) now processing devices for offsite clinics and doctors' offices.  Vaginal speculums fall under the semi-critical devices category (Spaulding).

ICT spoke with Karen Swanson LPN, CSPM, CFER, manager of the central sterile department at Connecticut Children's Medical Center and chairman of the board of directors of the Certification Board for Sterile Processing (CBSPD), regarding the challenges that face sterile processing professionals and the importance of building key skill sets.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, The Rockefeller University, The City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY), a $7.5 million grant for the Center for AIDS Research focused on preventing HIV transmission and ending the AIDS epidemic.

Globally, an estimated 71 million people are living with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV). Over decades of infection, chronic HCV infection results in progressive damage to the liver and an increased risk for end stage liver disease and liver cancer, making the virus the leading cause of liver-related deaths in the United States today. While effective combination therapies have recently been developed, HCV can evolve to become resistant to these antiviral drugs, potentially resulting in treatment failures. Resistance is particularly important for one class of medications used in treatment, for which the mechanism by which it stops growth of the virus is poorly understood. For the first time, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have identified how the class of antiviral drugs known as NS5A inhibitors interacts with the virus, and their findings show a difference between strains of HCV. These results were published in PLOS Pathogens.

Multidisciplinary teams face numerous challenges as they respond to an outbreak of Ebola virus disease in the remote, forested regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The World Health Organization (WHO) and partners are supporting the country’s Ministry of Health in all aspects of the response, including epidemiological investigation, surveillance, logistics and supplies, communications, and community engagement.

An electronic sepsis alert using a combination of vital signs, risk factors and physician judgment to identify children in a pediatric emergency department with severe sepsis reduced missed diagnoses by 76 percent. The results of the study, along with an accompanying editorial, were published online Friday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Improving Recognition of Pediatric Severe Sepsis in the Emergency Department: Contributions of a Vital Sign-Based Electronic Alert and Bedside Clinician Identification" and "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Use of Real-Time Tools to Identify Children with Severe Sepsis in the Pediatric Emergency Department").

The world may be closer to knowing why Ebola spreads so easily thanks to a team of researchers from Tulane University and other leading institutions who discovered a new biological activity in a small protein from the deadly virus. The team's findings were recently published in the Journal of Virology.

New advice on which antibiotics to use for common infections and which to preserve for the most serious circumstances is among the additions to the World Health Organization (WHO) model list of essential medicines for 2017. Other additions include medicines for HIV, hepatitis C, tuberculosis and leukemia.

A clinical trial of an experimental vaccine to prevent infection with chikungunya virus is now enrolling healthy adult volunteers at three sites in the United States. The Phase 1/2 trial, which is sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, is being conducted at several NIAID-funded Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Units. The candidate vaccine, MV-CHIKV, was developed by Themis Bioscience of Vienna, Austria.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York have discovered that bacteria living in the gut provide a first line of defense against severe Listeria infections. The study, which will be published June 6 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, suggests that providing these bacteria in the form of probiotics could protect individuals who are particularly susceptible to Listeria, including pregnant women and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.

In healthcare facilities, Clostridium difficile infections spread by transmission of bacterial spores. Appropriate sporicidal disinfectants are needed to prevent development of clusters and outbreaks. In this study by Kenters, et al. (2017), different cleaning/disinfecting wipes and sprays were tested for their efficacy against spores of distinctive C. difficile PCR ribotypes.

One of the primary ways physicians diagnose urinary tract infections is with a test that detects bacteria in urine. A new enhanced test, developed at Loyola University Chicago, detects significantly more bacteria than the standard test, according to a study presented at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans.

Seventy-three years ago Tuesday, on June 6, 1944, the D-Day invasion of Normandy was bolstered by millions of doses of a precious new substance: penicillin. On the other side of the Atlantic, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and other institutions had spent the last three years pursuing advances in penicillin production. Though discovered 16 years prior, the world’s first natural antibiotic was expensive and difficult to wring from the mold that makes it. By discovering new strains, isolating more productive mutants, and improving growing methods, UW-Madison biologists helped supply Allied troops with enough penicillin to treat life-threatening infections.