CDC Invests $10 million for Research to Reduce Infections in Healthcare Settings

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today announces an award of $10 million for new research to five academic centers as part of its Prevention Epicenter grant program, which supports efforts to develop and test innovative approaches to reducing infections in healthcare settings.

The CDC estimates that each year about 2 million infections are acquired in healthcare settings, resulting in about 90,000 deaths and more than $4.5 billion in excess healthcare costs. With the emergence of drug-resistant infections and new pathogens in healthcare settings, new strategies to detect and reduce healthcare-associated infections become even more critical.

"We're investing in these prevention epicenters because we want to continue to improve patient health," said Dr. Denise Cardo, director of CDC's Division of Healthcare Quality and Promotion. "By focusing on some of the most difficult and persistent problems facing healthcare institutions today, these epicenters will help make healthcare safer for everyone."

The new prevention epicenters' work focuses on finding better ways to identify and prevent healthcare-associated infections, including antimicrobial resistant infections, surgical site infections, Clostridium difficile-associated diarrhea, drug-resistant staph infections and catheter-associated bloodstream infections.

Listed below are the names of the principal investigators and their institutions, representing 58 affiliated hospitals:

-- Matthew Samore, MD, University of Utah, Salt Lake City

-- Victoria Fraser, MD, WashingtonUniversity, St. Louis

-- Kurt B. Stevenson, MD, MPH, OhioStateUniversity, Columbus, Ohio

-- Richard Platt, MD, Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, Boston

-- Robert Weinstein, MD, Cook CountyBureau of Health Services and Rush

University Medical Center , Chicago

The CDC launched the Prevention Epicenter program in 1997 to promote new ways to address difficult problems such as reducing the burden of healthcare-associated infections and antibiotic resistance. The CDC names new prevention epicenters every five years based on peer-reviewed grant applications. The prevention epicenters select and collaborate on joint research projects.

In recent years, the work of prevention epicenters has advanced knowledge on improving judicious antimicrobial use in hospitals, understanding and preventing the transmission of antimicrobial resistant organisms in hospitals, developing better ways to identify infections following surgery and preventing catheter-associated bloodstream infections among patients.

Source: CDC