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One good housekeeper can prevent more diseases than a dozen doctors can cure. Some patients are so ill that a healthcare-associated infection (HAI) can take a patients life, even if there were a room full of doctors to provide treatment. Just as medical personnel care for patients, environmental services (ES) professionals work to keep hospitals healthy. This article is a nuts-and-bolts piece meant to improve the health of healthcare facilities. There are a few basic things we need to do to make ES departments effective -- proper hiring and training of staff, adequate design of ES work areas, accurate appraisal of task loads, and concise time management of the frontline staff.

A little information can go a surprisingly long way when it comes to understanding rodent-borne infectious disease, as shown by a new study led by John Orrock from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

To understand where clinical microbiology is going in the future, it's helpful to take a quick trip back in history. Years ago, the Study on the Efficacy of Nosocomial Infection Control project established the scientific basis for claims of efficacy of hospital-acquired infection surveillance and control programs, and the importance of clinical microbiology laboratories (CMLs) was emphasized. (Scheckler, 1998).

The meaning of the standard fecal coliform test used to monitor water quality has been called into question by a new study that identified sources of Escherichia coli bacteria that might not indicate an environmental hazard.