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A nationwide campaign to vaccinate 5.8 million children in Iraq against polio was concluded on Oct. 11, 2015 after a two-day extension recommended by the Ministry of Health to achieve maximum vaccination coverage. This effort to ensure that Iraq remains polio free also included the dissemination of life-saving information to 1.5 million households across the country on how to detect, prevent and treat cholera.

Someone recently asked me, “As a central sterile (CS) manager, what keeps you up at night – what is it that scares you the most relating to your department?”  As I thought about all the possible things that could go wrong, from the mundane such as an autoclave breaking down to the exotic scenario such as a sprinkler system failure forcing me to reprocess all instruments, one thing jumped out in my mind and truly made me shudder. “Losing my staff,” I answered, “in fact, most CS managers would say the same.”

Q: Our sterile processing department (SPD) is sent explanted implants (screws, plates) to clean and sterilize so the patient can take them home. I have questioned this practice but do not have documentation to challenge this decision.

Imagine a submicroscopic packet of proteins arranged symmetrically to enclose an inner genome -- and you have a virus. Viruses are so miniscule in size that most require electron microscopy to see them clearly, and more than 3,000 polio virus particles could fit end-to-end in a straight line across the period at the end of this sentence.  Now, that’s small! Yet, many viruses wreak havoc on vastly larger and more complex organisms.

Ian Norton is an emergency physician who came to West Africa in 2014 to help find and coordinate foreign medical teams to treat people with Ebola virus disease. Under Norton’s guidance, WHO developed a registry of foreign medical teams around the world able to respond rapidly not only to Ebola but to other health emergencies.

Robots are capable of all sorts of tasks to help better treat cancer: They connect oncologists to patients remotely, make incisions, staple them shut, deliver "nano" therapies--and they clean rooms. New research from Penn Medicine infection control specialists found that ultraviolet (UV) robots helped reduce the rates transmission of the common bacterial infection known as Clostridium difficile among cancer inpatients - mostly blood cancer patients, a group more vulnerable to hospital-acquired infections - by 25 percent. The interventions also saved about $150,000 in annual direct medical costs.