News

As of May 16, 2015, a cholera outbreak was confirmed in the Kigoma region, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, along the Tanzania border with Burundi. Cholera is endemic in the region, but due to a recent influx of thousands of Burundian refugees, overcrowding and poor sanitation, the situation got worse. As of May 28, 2015, a total of 4,487 suspected cholera cases have been reported so far.

Like a dairy farmer tending to a herd of cows to produce milk, researchers are tending to colonies of the bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli) to produce new forms of antibiotics - including three that show promise in fighting drug-resistant bacteria. The research, which will be published May 29 in the journal Science Advances, was led by Blaine A. Pfeifer, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering in the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His team included first author Guojian Zhang, Yi Li and Lei Fang, all in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

NIOSH and the National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory (NPPTL) announce the release of three documents related to respiratory protection in healthcare.

In light of the fatal case of Lassa fever in the U.S., the World Health Organization (WHO) offers the following information on this acute viral hemorrhagic illness.

Therapies administered via vascular access catheters are a mainstay of both acute and chronic medical treatment. In fact when all types of vascular catheters are combined, the category may well represent the largest type of invasive device used in healthcare. However their ubiquitous presence, ironically, makes it very difficult to measure with any degree of statistical precision their associated device utilization rates. The use of peripheral catheters (PIVs), for example, is so widespread in the United States that their use is obscured  among other procedure codes, rather being coded separately,  and recorded uniquely only in individual patient records. Aggregate data is absent in any administrative datasets.  In general the frequency of catheter use must be inferred from the number of units sold by their various manufacturers. Today, this number reportedly exceeds 300 million but is at best an estimate.

If you have ever watched a fibrin sheath progress to a thrombus on the surface of a catheter -- a process that initiates instantly upon entry into the bloodstream and proceeds quickly, often in just minutes -- you will understand why the presence of contaminating bacteria on the surface of a catheter is something to be rigorously avoided. The rapidly forming fibrin sheath encases such surface bacteria, both shielding them and facilitating biofilm formation.