News

With the new landscape of managed care, it is vital for hospitals and medical centers to  enhance their efficiencies. With the modernization of computer software systems designed for healthcare, there is an opportunity for improvements. The Conflict Schedule Checker (CSC) is available in most OR scheduling systems. Healthcare organizations may or may not be aware of this capability and its functionality to surgical instrument management.

This new column, SPD Dialogue, will respond to questions asked by sterile processing professionals. We hope you find this dialogue helpful and informative.Q: My loaner representative wants to wash his instruments in my department. I think this would be a great help to my SPD. Should I permit this?

Every morning since the first of two recent earthquakes struck Nepal on April 25, Dr. Sharmila Shrestha and researcher Sanjita Thapa have made the hour-long journey from Kathmandu to Kavrepulanchok, a district east of Kathmandu valley, with one goal in mind – to protect people against disease outbreaks. Following the buckled Araniko Highway toward the hilltop town of Dhulikhel, the district headquarters, the pair pick up Chief District Health Officer Rajendra Prasad Shaha before arriving at the district health office for their morning meeting.

The recent discovery of a novel antibody that works in an unusual way might inspire ideas for designing more effective vaccines. Among the common pathogens that could be targeted are urinary-tract infecting strains of E. coli. The antibody appears to have properties that might keep bacteria from adhering to human cell surfaces and also dislodge those already attached.

Tokay geckos harbor bacteria that are resistant to a number of antibiotics, making them a health concern for pet owners, according to a study by University of Georgia researchers. Tokay geckos, a type of gecko known for the "to-kay" sound it makes, are caught in the wild and often imported into the pet trade in the U.S.

A new Australian study shows that cells which form the bulk of our fast-acting 'innate' immune system behave differently, depending on whether an injury is infected or not. It is well known that paparazzi-like neutrophils swarm to sites of injury within minutes to undertake damage control and kill invaders. Most have very short lives and self-destruct once their job is done.

An international team, including archaeologists from the University of Southampton, has found evidence suggesting leprosy may have spread to Britain from Scandinavia. The team, led by the University of Leiden, and including researchers from Historic England and the universities of Southampton, Birmingham, Surrey, and Swansea, examined a 1500 year old male skeleton, excavated at Great Chesterford in Essex, England during the 1950s.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Minnesota has found a three-way link among antibiotic use in infants, changes in the gut bacteria, and disease later in life. The imbalances in gut microbes, called dysbiosis, have been tied to infectious diseases, allergies and other autoimmune disorders, and even obesity, later in life.

Researchers at the Institute of Food Research have established how clostridia bacteria emerge from spores. This could help them understand how these bacteria germinate and go on to produce the deadly toxin responsible for botulism, a lethal form of food poisoning, or cause food spoilage.

On May 9, 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reached a milestone, sending the 1,000th field deployer to West Africa as part of the largest outbreak response in the agency’s history.

In June 2014, Jim Strong and Allen Grolla, laboratory scientists from the Public Health Agency of Canada, were deployed through the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) to work with WHO in Guinea and Sierra Leone. They had experience working in previous hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in Angola, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya. As they began receiving and testing specimens they realized they were in the middle of something much bigger than any of the outbreaks they had seen before.