News

Influenza activity continues to increase in the United States and most of the country is now experiencing high levels of influenza-like-illness (ILI), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s latest FluView report.

Infection Control Today asked members of industry to describe the importance of patient involvement in hand hygiene and suggest some best practices for implementation into an existing hospital-based hand hygiene program.

The healing hands of a healthcare professional too often bear the risk of spreading infection while administering care. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), failure to engage in proper hand hygiene is the leading cause of healthcare-associated infections and the spread of multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs), including vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile. Unfortunately, proper hand hygiene can be easily forgotten by busy healthcare workers. A study of 2,834 opportunities for hand hygiene found that hands were cleansed only 48 percent of the time, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) report (2009).

ICT presents a look at the regulatory, legislative and policy issues affecting infection prevention.

Local activists continue to voice their objections at area hospitals over the practice of trucking infectious medical waste through local communities to be treated at a remote facility. As Safe Hospitals Safe Communities spokesperson Debra Pelletier notes, "We are visiting area hospitals to raise awareness about the transportation of medical waste through local communities and ask for safer disposal of medical waste. Nearly 1,000 hospitals now use on-site sterilization technologies that prevent infectious medical waste from being trucked through our neighborhoods, thus stopping the spread of infectious pathogens and preventing possible accidents and spills."