Turkey Links

We at the Ye Olde Humble Controversies Blog (YOHCB) wish you a safe and happy Thanksgiving. We have lots to be thankful for including the many tireless state and federal partners in infection prevention, fantastic infection preventionists, colleagues across many clinical disciplines and our readership. Thank you!

While you are out and about or gathered around a turkey or television, you might want to browse these studies/posts which we haven't covered yet. Just promise that you won't read any while driving, OK?

Links:

1) Stephan Harbarth's group has published in BMJ Open a surgical patient sub-study under MOSAR comparing the impact of (1) enhanced hand hygiene promotion (2) universal MRSA screening and decolonization  or (3) risk-factor based, targeted MRSA screening and enhanced hand hygiene in 10 hospitals encompassing 33 surgical wards. This quasi-experimental study found that neither intervention alone reduced monthly MRSA clinical culture rates. However, the combined intervention (3) was associated with a 12% reduction in monthly clinical cultures.

2) The CDDEP Blog has a new post by Stan Deresinksi covering Antibiotic Stewardship Programs and Education. Stanford's antimicrobial stewardship program has just posted an online course covering appropriate antimicrobial use.

3) Think Like an Anthropologist (HBR). Even though this is a business-oriented article, I think its points are generalizable to health-related administrative data. Key portion of the article: "efforts are typically driven by econometricians, computer scientists, and IT technicians—the people who are expert in database management. They understand digital information, but they don’t always understand how to get from information to meaning. So they boil the data down to percentages, treating random comments (and pictures of people with foil on their legs) as noise. But if you want meaning, you have to think like an anthropologist."

4) Marin Schweizer and colleagues from CDDEP recently published an study in ARIC looking at whether clinicians prescribed antibiotics based on national MRSA or local MRSA data. Clinicians appeared to prescribe linezolid and clindamycin based on national MRSA data but not local data suggesting that providing better local antibiogram data might help with outpatient antimicrobial stewardship efforts.

5) There's a really nice paper in Pediatrics that explores the importance of clustering of unvaccinated patients in the recent California pertussis epidemic. It appears that non-medical exemptions may be contributing significantly to the spread of pertussis. h/t Melissa W

6) There's a new study in PLoS Medicine that recalculated the mortality associated with pandemic 2009 H1N1. This study found mortality to be ten times prior low estimates but in line with a typical influenza season. NPR covered the study. h/t Jonathan Eisen

7) The physician at the center of a Las Vegas clinic Hepatitis C outbreak received a life sentence. h/t Daniel Sexton

8) Finally, we have nothing to worry about. The dragonfly's nano-tech black silicon will eliminate those nasty bacteria. It'll even kill spores.  h/t Judy Stone

Turkey: Best recipe (h/t MO Wright)

Photo Credit: Bob Evans