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Surgical site infections (SSI) continue to remain a national healthcare issue, raising costs due to prolonged hospitalization, additional diagnostic tests, treatment, and sometimes additional surgery. In fact, research suggests that SSIs can extend hospitals stays by seven to 10 days and cost $27,402 per incident, accounting for up to $10 billion annually in healthcare spending. That’s why Medline is working in partnership with the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare and Cleveland Clinic to share the latest SSI findings with healthcare leaders and medical device and clinical solution developers. The goal: uncover some of today’s real problems and barriers to spark serious dialogue and solutions.

In Sierra Leone, the Ebola outbreak has affected all aspects of healthcare. Exact numbers are yet to be confirmed but it is clear that many children have missed out on routine vaccination services and birth registration during the outbreak. To counter this, mass immunization campaigns are being held to enable children to catch up. In June this year, an integrated measles and polio campaign was conducted reaching 97 percent of children under the age of 5.

A new discovery by Michigan State University (MSU) scientists suggests that a common medication used to treat glaucoma could also be used to treat tuberculosis, even the drug-resistant kind. Robert Abramovitch, an MSU microbiologist, along with graduate student Benjamin Johnson who helped lead the study, have discovered that ethoxzolamide, a sulfa-based compound found in many prescription glaucoma drugs, actually turns off the bacterium's ability to invade the immune system.

Controlling mosquitoes that carry human diseases is a global health challenge as their ability to resist insecticides now threatens efforts to prevent epidemics. Scientists from the CNRS, IRD, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble and Institut Pasteur in French Guiana have identified new genetic markers for mosquito resistance to insecticides, which could improve its detection in the field. This work was published in Genome Research on July 23, 2015.

Dr. Carmem Pessoa da Silva is an infection control specialist at WHO. She was first deployed to Liberia in September 2014 when the Ebola outbreak was at its height. The number of people ill with Ebola greatly outnumbered the number of treatment beds. People needed help to safely care for their relatives and friends while waiting for an ambulance. This is how Pessoa da Silva and colleagues brought that help.

Cleaning and disinfecting are important parts of a comprehensive infection prevention strategy.  While the need for cleaning and disinfecting is increasing, there is also growing evidence that these activities can result in serious health problems, particularly respiratory illness. Occupational health programs in state health departments are receiving reports from the healthcare sector like the following case from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) take a toll on patients, their families, hospital staff and the bottom line, and impact the reputation of and funding for healthcare facilities. In fact, on any given day, 1 in 25 hospitalized patients, or roughly 600,000 each year, must deal with an HAI, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).