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Monthly Archives: November 2008
November 26, 2008
MRSA in newborns on Prince Edward Island: HA? CA? Matters?
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There’s been a running story for several weeks now about the Queen Elizabeth Hospital on Prince Edward Island (home to mussels and Anne of Green Gables). The hospital struggled earlier this year with an outbreak of MRSA and a second outbreak of VRE among adult patients. It got those under control, but since earlier this [...]
November 24, 2008
British infection control: Epic fail
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Via the Guardian comes news that British hospitals are failing miserably at hygiene and infection-control targets set by the Healthcare Commission, a government-funded but independent watchdog agency somewhat analogous to the United States’ Joint Commission (formerly called JCAHO).
While community-associated MRSA is still a somewhat new story in the the UK, hospital or nosocomial MRSA is [...]
November 20, 2008
A moment of silence
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Constant readers, I am very sad to tell you that Lori Hall Steele, the writer and single mother afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, died Wednesday. As I told you back in September, she could no longer work, could not pay her mortgage or her medical bills, and was about to lose her house to foreclosure, [...]
November 18, 2008
Contributing to resistance: fake drugs?
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There’s news this morning that Interpol has seized $6.65 million of counterfeit medicines in the culmination of a 5-month undercover investigation that stretched across Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The fakes included purported antiretrovirals for HIV, anti-TB drugs, antimalarials (especially artemisinin) — and, chillingly for our purposes here, fake antibiotics for pneumonia [...]
November 16, 2008
New newspaper series on HA-MRSA
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The Seattle Times this morning launched an three-day investigative project on incidence of HA-MRSA in Washington State that is worth reading.
As readers here already know, MRSA is not a reportable disease, and there are no diagnosis codes that directly correspond to MSRA that make infection or death easily trackable through hospital records or death certificates. [...]
November 11, 2008
Despite stewardship efforts, antibiotic use increasing
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Well, this is bad news.
I hope we can all agree that antibiotic use creates antibiotic resistance. (Proof, if any were needed, that the universe has a captious sense of humor; but then it has had millennia to practice. OK, sorry for the anthropomorphizing.) The more pressure bacteria are placed under, the more resistant mutants emerge [...]
November 9, 2008
MRSA in meat in Louisiana: pig meat, human strain
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On Nov. 3, I posted on an enterprising group of TV stations in the Pacific Northwest who had retail meat in four states tested for MRSA. I said at the time that it was the first finding of MRSA in meat in the US that I knew of.
Turns out that I was wrong by three [...]
November 6, 2008
New report and recommendations, "Why Infectious Diseases Are a Threat to America"
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I’m still catching up post-ICAAC – and in addition am on the road reporting, again. But I’m trying to keep all y’all informed. (That’s a clue to my destination. Where in the US is “y’all” a single noun and “all y’all” the plural? Hint: It’s the same place where “barbecue” is only made of beef… [...]
November 4, 2008
Final report from ICAAC-IDSA 08 (news from ICAAC, 3)
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The ICAAC-IDSA (48th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and 46th annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America) meeting ended a week ago, and I’m still thrashing my way through the thousands of abstracts.
Here’s my final, highly unscientific selection of papers that caught my eye:
* Evidence that the community-strain clone USA300 is [...]
Bad news on the new-drugs front
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