CDC Prevention Epicenters expanded!

Regular readers know that we often call for increased funding for infection prevention. So naturally we’re very excited that CDC is expanding their Prevention Epicenters program from five centers to eleven. The University of Iowa is honored to be one of the newly added Prevention Epicenters (we’re actually rejoining this program after being a Prevention Epicenter for the first two cycles, from 1997-2005). The principal investigator for the Iowa Prevention Epicenter is fellow blogger Eli Perencevich, with additional project leadership by Loreen Herwaldt, Phil Polgreen, Marin Schweizer, and support and collaboration from many other investigators both at Iowa and at other centers across the country. 

You can read more about the program expansion at CDC's Safe Healthcare blog (post to go up later today), and from the CDC press release. And of course we’ll continue blogging periodically about work funded by this program. All I would add is that this is a good start: if we were to provide funding commensurate to the magnitude of the problem of healthcare associated infections, we’d expand the Prevention Epicenter network another 10-fold or more. To do so would not be a major investment in the context of other funding priorities. For example, the total of $11 million dollars awarded to the six new Epicenters is $3 million dollars less than the annual cost of establishing a redundant Catfish Inspection Office.