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In the war between drugs and drug-resistant diseases, is the current strategy for medicating patients giving many drug-resistant diseases a big competitive advantage?, asks a research paper that will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper argues for new research efforts to discover effective ways for managing the evolution and slowing the spread of drug-resistant disease organisms. The ultimate goal of this new research effort is to develop a new science-based model for drug-resistance management that will inform treatment guidelines for a wide variety of diseases that affect people, including malaria and other diseases caused by parasites, MRSA and other diseases caused by bacterial infections, AIDS and other diseases caused by viruses, and cancer.

ICT spoke with Russell N. Olmsted, MPH, CIC, the 2011 president of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), about current issues and critical next steps to advance the infection prevention agenda.

Once eggs are laid, their natural resistance to pathogens begins to wear down, but a Purdue University scientist believes he knows how to rearm those defenses. Kevin Keener, an associate professor of food science, created a process for rapidly cooling eggs that is designed to inhibit the growth of bacteria such as salmonella. The same cooling process would saturate the inside of an egg with carbon dioxide and alter pH levels, which he has found are connected to the activity of an enzyme called lysozyme, which defends egg whites from bacteria.

Hospital operating rooms (ORs) and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) must confront more than their fair share of challenges in the current healthcare environment. Many facilities are working with limited capital and non-capital budgets; facilities have cut back on spending. Volumes of surgical procedures have been reduced as a notable percentage of people are unexpectedly without insurance due to job losses. Those patients are procrastinating on surgical procedures while they search for new employment.