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A recent study has found that patients placed in contact precautions were twice as likely to report perceived problems with care compared to patients without contact precautions, placing the common infection control practice at odds with hospital interests. These patient complaints are often reflected in diminished scores on the HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) Survey, a standardized survey instrument and data collection methodology for measuring patients' perspectives on hospital care developed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) along with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

Tests at two wastewater treatment plants in northern China revealed antibiotic-resistant bacteria were not only escaping purification but also breeding and spreading their dangerous cargo. Joint research by scientists from Rice, Nankai and Tianjin universities found superbugs carrying New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), a multidrug-resistant gene first identified in India in 2010, in wastewater disinfected by chlorination. They found significant levels of NDM-1 in the effluent released to the environment and even higher levels in dewatered sludge applied to soils.

Wolbachia, a symbiont that resides naturally in up to 70 percent of all insect species, are probably the most prevalent infectious bacteria on Earth. In 2008 Luis Teixeira, now a principal investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC, Portugal), and other scientists have discovered that Wolbachia can protect their hosts against viral infections. Since then, several studies have been made to further investigate the interactions between Wolbachia and insects, aiming to build new strategies to use this bacterium in the control of diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, such as dengue. Now, Luis Teixeira's research team studied the genetic variability of Wolbachia strains and discovered that bacteria that give stronger protection against virus grow to higher concentrations and often shorten the host's lifespan. These results help to understand Wolbachia evolution in nature and open the way to the identification of the best strains to be used in the biocontrol of mosquito-spread diseases. This work was published in the latest issue of PLOS Genetics.

A new discovery by scientists could help combat the spread of sleeping sickness. Insights into how the parasites that cause the disease are able to communicate with one another could help limit the spread of the infection. The findings suggest that new drugs could be designed to disrupt the flow of messages sent between these infectious microorganisms.

New data posted today and gathered through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) gives patients a first look at how their local hospitals are doing at preventing Clostridium difficile infections (deadly diarrhea) and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bloodstream infections. This information, as well as other hospital performance measures, is collected as part of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) Program and is publicly available on the Hospital Compare website.