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ICT spoke with Patti Koncur, CRCST, CHMMC, ACE, education coordinator, and Natalie Lind, CRCST, CHL, education director, both of the International Association of Healthcare Central Service Materiel Management (IAHCSMM), about the challenges professionals face when working in the sterile processing (SPD) and central sterile supply (CSSD) departments.

As the chief scientific officer for Xenex Healthcare Services, I see firsthand the selection process for room disinfection systems at many facilities. As with any hospital purchasing process, multiple individuals are involved. The biggest difficulty is that the people involved may all be asking different questions. Some individuals may get very interested in the different technologies while others will only care about the economics of the purchase. I believe that by taking the group through a question forming exercise, the selection process can be streamlined. Of course, before getting to the question, it is best to understand the problem.

A recent discovery of "hypervirulent" Salmonella bacteria has given UC Santa Barbara researchers Michael Mahan and Douglas Heithoff a means to potentially prevent food poisoning outbreaks from these particularly powerful strains. Their findings, in a paper titled "Intraspecies Variation in the Emergence of Hyperinfectious Bacterial Strains in Nature," have been published in the journal PLoS Pathogens.