Upon Further Review: Reexamining the Illinois MRSA Active Surveillance Mandate

“Thinking without the positing of categories and concepts in general would be as impossible as breathing in a vacuum” – Albert Einstein (1949)

A couple weeks ago, Scott highlighted a study in CID by Lin et al. that sought to estimate the benefits of the 2007 Illinois state-wide mandate of MRSA active surveillance cultures in ICU settings. The post was titled “Good Intentions Does not Always Mean Good Policy” and concluded “There may be many reasons the hospitals in Illinois overall are seeing an estimated 30% decrease in their hospital-onset MRSA BSI (as most states are) since the 2010 NHSN baseline, but admission screening isn’t one of them.” 

I would like to list several reasons why I think we should reconsider the study authors’ conclusions. And if you skip to the end, you will read why I think this study might make more valid conclusions about the lack of benefits of CHG bathing.

Let’s start with validity from Shadish (2001) et al: “We use the term validity to refer to the proximate truth of an inference. When we say something is valid, we make a judgement about the extent to which relevant evidence supports that inference as being true of correct.” Cook and Campbell (1979) outlined four components of validity: statistical conclusion validity, internal validity, construct validity and external validity. I’ve written about their validity typology here, if you’re interested. 

Now let’s review the Illinois study methods. They included data from 25 ICUs and completed eight, one-day point prevalence surveys AFTER the mandate was initiated (twice annually 2008-2011 and annually in 2012 and 2013). There was no concurrent control group.

Thus, this quasi-experimental study design has very low internal validity. It has no measurement before the intervention (sometimes called historical controls) and no concurrent controls. Shadish labeled this design as a “one-group post-test only design” and summarized its limitations with “this design is rarely useful.”

The Illinois study also lacks statistical validity, since it is underpowered to detect a benefit of active surveillance. Shadish lists low statistical power as the first threat to statistical validity since “the experiment may incorrectly conclude that the relationship between treatment and outcome is not significant.” Since the Illinois study is a negative one – claiming active surveillance for MRSA didn’t work, power is particularly important. If you jump ahead to my ICAAC abstract, you will begin to see why the study is likely very underpowered. Point prevalence is very insensitive to changes in acquisition or transmission, so you would need very large studies to see a benefit.

I’ll admit that a statewide study has strong external validity – that is generalizability. 

But let’s focus on construct validity. Construct validity - what Einstein was hinting at in the quote above - describes whether a study measures what it claims to be measuring. For example, if a study claims that active surveillance for MRSA and isolation doesn’t prevent MRSA transmission, that study better measure MRSA transmission. 

Let’s pause here. Now some might say, we don’t care about transmission, we just care about MRSA prevalence or MRSA infections or MRSA CLABSI (or even deaths in Avengers movies). Yet, active surveillance for MRSA doesn’t work like that – it prevents transmission between patients. 

But what if measuring MRSA point prevalence was good enough at detecting MRSA transmission? Thought experiment: what if we found PCN allergy alerts in the EMR annoying and so we eliminated them? To see if this was safe, we then checked to see if anyone was having a PCN allergic reaction every St Patrick’s Day for the next 5 years. Good enough, right? Probably not. Why would we be comfortable saying yearly point prevalence is an adequate way of measuring the benefits of MRSA transmission? I don’t think we should and here’s why:

Back in 2002 I presented an abstract at ICAAC titled: “Point Prevalence and Clinical Culture Positivity of Vancomycin Resistant Enterococci are Poor Estimates of Infection Control Intervention Impact.” This study was based on the VRE model that we eventually published in CID (2004). Anyway, we modeled VRE transmission in the ICU under a condition where active surveillance compliance on admission increased from 60% to 100% and I assumed that isolation prevented 71% of transmissions. This is a math model, so we know that the intervention worked– but could we detect it? The answer was yes but only if we used admission/discharge screening cultures.  If we used point prevalence, like the Illinois study, we would falsely claim that the intervention didn’t work 54% of the time. However, if we used admission/discharge cultures, we would correctly determine that the intervention worked 96% of the time. Here is our conclusion:

“Point prevalence or clinical culture positivity often failed to detect a benefit due to stochastic fluctuations in prevalence and high prevalence of VRE in patients entering the ICU. Studies to assess the benefits of active surveillance for VRE should measure new incident cases. Relying on point prevalence or clinical culture positivity to assess the benefits of infection control interventions may underestimate the magnitude of their benefit and may be responsible for a persistent bias against the broader institution of active surveillance. The benefits of active surveillance and other infection control interventions are probably underestimated.”  

Not bad for 16 years ago – replace VRE with MRSA and you can see why the study by Lin et al cannot be used to evaluate the benefits of active surveillance. Our conclusion was partially driven, as we said, by high rates of VRE colonization on admission. What did Lin et al say about their study: “we assessed MRSA prevalence in a region where MRSA is widely endemic both in the community and within healthcare facilities.” Thus, the MRSA situation in Illinois fits closely with what we modeled.

In conclusion – the study by Lin et al should not be used to claim active surveillance was ineffective in Illinois or elsewhere. When drawing inferences, it is important to remember all four components of validity described by Cook and Campbell 40 years ago. We still need to figure out why MRSA has declined by 30% in Illinois and elsewhere. I do wonder why we are so quick to claim CLABSI bundles, CHG bathing (see below) or other interventions have been driving these MRSA reductions and not active surveillance. If I had to guess, it’s something yellow and not the data.

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Side note: In this same study, the number of hospitals using CHG bathing in their ICUs went from 5 (20%) to 17 (68%). It appears the authors could use these same data and methods to show that CHG doesn’t prevent MRSA in ICUs settings. Interestingly since CHG bathing works at the level of transmission and also on individual patients’ decolonization, point prevalence data would have higher construct validity for evaluating CHG. The study might even be better powered to detect a benefit of CHG.

Will Antimicrobial Stewardship be the Next Target for De-implementation?

First, an honest confession, Mike's tweet had nothing to do with antimicrobial stewardship, but rather contact precautions. But his point is just as valid when discussing antimicrobial stewardship and there will come a time when forces will align to question the benefits and costs of stewardship programs since now and in the future they will lack the "necessary" cluster-randomized trial evidence supporting their existence.

There is a longer discussion to be had here sometime in the future, when I'm not writing a Center grant renewal, but the key question is what we consider "high-level" evidence. For most de-implementation supporters and indeed most infection control and stewardship guideline authors, high-level evidence is synonymous with individual or cluster-randomized trials. They simply cannot accept non-randomized, quasi-experimental designs as evidence. It is gotten to the point that the recent CDI Guidelines completely excluded quasi-expermintal designs from their level of evidence figure, despite the fact that one of the original Grade Criteria papers lists QE studies in its table and allows them to be ranked higher than RCTs, if certain criteria are met.

OK.  So why am I rambling on about level of evidence and misapplying a tweet from 2 weeks ago? There was a new systematic review just published in AJIC by Leandro Bertollo and colleagues that asked the question: "Are antimicrobial stewardship programs effective strategies for preventing antibiotic resistance?" To answer this question they reviewed all studies published between from January 2012 to January 2017 and followed the standard PRISMA statement recommendations for reporting their findings.

Results: They identified and extracted data from 26 studies, of which 22 were single-center and four were multicenter studies. Study designs are listed in Table 2, below, with the special note that none of the before/after studies included a contemporaneous, unexposed control group. A major concern that the authors identified was that in 7 of the 26 studies (30%), there was evidence that infection control interventions were implemented at the same time as the stewardship intervention and that the majority (57%) of the stewardship studies that reported positive results were confounded by simultaneous implementation of new infection control practices. High fives for hand hygiene.

Their conclusion: "There is no solid evidence that ASPs are effective in reducing antibiotic resistance in hospital settings. There are still few studies analyzing this matter, most of them with inappropriate study designs. We uphold the need for more studies with appropriate study designs and standardized ASP interventions targeting common microorganism-antibiotic pairs."

The need for more studies. Sounds like the siren call for de-implementation to me. Sure, we can wait around a decade or four for some magical $20 million cluster-randomized study that swabs all patients on admission/discharge, completes a full microbiome analysis and tracks patients for a year post discharge for resistant infections. Or, we can expand our ideas around what "high-level" evidence means and fund well-designed and controlled quasi-experimental studies and also consider strong epidemiological evidence, such as exposure to antibiotics leads to colonization with resistant pathogens. We can be logical. Yeah, not gonna happen. But at least you were warned.

Guest Post: Thinking about Contact Precautions

Anthony Harris, MD MPH

This is a guest post from Dr. Anthony Harris, Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Maryland School of Medicine.

I have a lot of admiration for this blog and in the spirit of academics, I would like to share my somewhat different interpretation of the contact precautions literature. I offer three points for your consideration:
 
1. Contact precautions do not lead to an increase in adverse events: 

Instead of the frequently cited small observational studies, I think it is most important to focus on the one randomized trial that evaluated adverse events associated with contact precautions (I acknowledge my bias in that it is the study I led). A randomized trial should most often trump observational studies especially since it's near impossible to control for confounding by indication, i.e. why was the patient placed on contact precautions. In fact, the latest analysis of our randomized trial data showed a trend towards decreased adverse events in the universal contact precaution arm. (See: Croft L et al. Clin Infect Dis. 2015 Aug 15;61(4):545-53). To quote from the Conclusion: "Concerns of adverse events resulting from universal glove and gown use were not supported." So we should be clear that other than the cost issues of gloves and gowns no high level study has shown any adverse events from contact precautions. Healthcare workers do go into the patient room less often when the patient is on contact precautions but this has not been shown to lead to an increase in adverse events. In my experience (and the data supports this), healthcare workers just bundle their activities and thus perform the same activities in the room with fewer visits.

2. Methodological problems in studies that have removed contact precautions: 

Studies that show no effect of removing contact precautions have serious methodological problems. The largest problem is that they are incredibly under-powered. The studies that show “no difference when you remove contact precautions” are too small to detect a difference and thus may falsely conclude that removing contact precautions is safe.

3. Need a better solution before removing the current standard of contact precautions: 

As much as I would love to stop wearing gloves and gowns, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a continuing problem. They are not going away and other than MRSA, they are not decreasing. Until we have better solutions, I believe that we should not be abandoning contact precautions. This is particularly true in high risk settings such as the ICU. In the ICU where acquisition of an MDRO leads to infection 20-30% of the time during the index ICU admission, the stakes are too high not to prevent patient-to-patient transmission. I believe that the phase 0, phase 1 and phase 2 data on contact precautions are strong and the biologic plausibility that they prevent patient-to-patient transmission so strong that I don’t think we should abandon contact precautions based on underpowered "removal studies" and an adverse-event literature with few studies with strong internal validity. Of course there are certain settings and certain bacteria where removing contact precautions might make sense and these scenarios should be studied using large, sufficiently powered and methodologically sound trials.

Give Gloves a Chance: Benefits of Mandatory Gloving Policy in Pediatrics

We spend a lot of time discussing the importance of clean hands in preventing hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). Most of the time we equate clean hands with hand-hygiene compliance and complicated and fleeting surveillance and educational programs. It would be one thing if these efforts led to compliance levels above 90%, but even the Joint Commission could barely get compliance above 80% after massive efforts.

Which leads me to one question - are we asking the wrong question?

Instead of focusing solely on driving hand hygiene compliance above 90%, perhaps we should focus on clean hands. If we ask a new question: "What do we need to do at our hospital to get healthcare worker hands to be 90% clean?", we get very different answers than if we focus solely on increasing hand rub use. For example, we could begin studying long-acting hand disinfection products that work all day or environmental cleaning products that keep hands clean in the first place. And another thing we could consider looking at is the benefits of the humble examination glove. We just published a study in Pediatrics, led by Jun Yin a PhD student in statistics, that aimed to do just that.

At the University of Iowa, we have a policy that mandates that healthcare workers wear gloves for all patient contacts during RSV season. We wanted to see if we could take advantage of this natural experiment to see what happened to HAI infection rates during the mandatory gloving periods compared to non-gloving periods.  To do that we completed a quasi-experimental study using time series analysis (Poisson regression models) on data from 2002-2010. We studied the effect in 5 units including a 20-bed PICU, a 62-bed NICU, a 5-bed Pediatric Bone Marrow Transplant Unit, a 26-bed Pediatric Hematology-Oncology Special Care Unit, and a 35-bed Pediatric Medical/Surgical Mixed Acuity Unit.

What did we find? Universal gloving periods were associated with a 25% reduction in HAI rates after adjusting for long term trends and seasonal effects. There was a 37% reduction in bloodstream infections (BSIs), a 39% reductions in central line-association BSIs and an 80% reduction in hospital-acquired pneumonias. The reductions were statistically significant in the PICU, NICU and Bone-Marrow Transplant Unit.

Yes, this unfunded study has limitations. It's a non-randomized, single center study. There could have been other factors that started just when RSV season started every year along with the gloving policy (although we couldn't think of any). Since this intervention was turned on and off every year for 9 years (with an exemption in 2009 for the novel H1N1 pandemic), it's unlikely there were other interventions that biased these results every year at the exact same time. 

Perhaps we need further study and cluster-randomized trails. We won't have to wait long. There is an important AHRQ-funded study that Anthony Harris's group is just completing at the University of Maryland that looks at the benefits of mandatory glove+gown policies in ICUs. However, this study won't tell us if it's the gowns or gloves or if they work in Pediatrics. So what do we do in the interim while waiting for future trials and magical interventions that get hand hygiene compliance above 90%?  All we are saying is "Give Gloves a Chance."

Reference: Yin J et al. Pediatrics April 22, 2013

Image: wikipedia

Media coverage: Reuters Health and Wired (Superbug)

Optimal Epidemiological Methods for Infection Prevention Studies

I've spent the last 12+ years writing about epidemiological methods for conducting risk-factor, outcomes and intervention studies of hospital-acquired infections. Instead of always reviewing the latest and greatest studies, I thought it might be fun to look back at some of the epi-methods papers that many of my colleagues and I have published since 2000. I think we've made some important contributions to infection prevention research, so it's kinda fun to look back at these. Over the next month or so, I hope to review other epi-methods topics that I think are particularly relevant to the study of hospital-acquired infections.

A decade ago, Anthony Harris and Yehuda Carmeli (and other folks) outlined optimal control-group selection in risk-factor studies for antibiotic resistant infections. (see here, here and here) Prior to these important studies, authors would frequently use patients infected with the susceptible organism as the control group. For example, when looking at risks for MRSA they would select MSSA controls, which is incorrect.  Unfortunately, many authors still select the wrong control group and unknowingly publish conditional odds-ratios.  I will discuss this more in a later post.

My first ever publication, and in some ways still my favorite, was a letter to the editor of CID that I wrote in 2000 pointing out a common flaw in outcome studies of infectious diseases. In the letter, I discussed a paper that looked at the outcomes (death) associated with methicillin-resistance in patients with S. aureus bacteremia. In the analysis, the authors controlled for septic shock in their regression model. I pointed out that shock is in the causal pathway between infection and death and, therefore, should not be controlled for in regression in models. This would be like controlling for car accidents when looking at the association between cell phone use and death. In infectious diseases, if you remove shock from the causal pathway, it is hard to see how you might otherwise die.

The error of controlling for intermediates is frequently repeated in ID outcome studies when, for example, authors control for illness severity using the APACHE score. If the APACHE is measured after the infection manifests, this variable would be in the causal pathway and should not be controlled for in the regression model. The APACHE should be measured before the infection manifests, as we did here. Jessina McGregor and JJ Furuno (both now at Oregon State) published a nice systematic review on optimal methods for ID outcome studies in CID back in 2007. Wouter Rottier (with Marc Bonten) just published a meta-analysis looking at the impact of confounders and intermediates (factors in the causal pathway) on ESBL-bacteremia outcomes. (JAC, March 5, 2012) I highly recommend that you read these studies prior to undertaking an ID outcome study.

Anthony Harris and I have also written extensively on the appropriate use and analysis of quasi-experimental studies looking at interventions to prevent hospital-acquired infections. In a trilogy of CID review articles, we reviewed the optimal quasi-experimental designs (2004), the frequency of each design's use (2005) and appropriate statistical analysis of time-series data (2007). If you're planning on doing a non-randomized study of any infection prevention intervention, please look these papers over. Following the optimal methods outlined in these reviews will improve your studies and also increase the chances that your intervention study's results will make the grade and be included in future systematic reviews, such as Cochrane reviews.

Image Reference: DA Grimes, Lancet 2002;359:57-61

Pre-emptive contact precautions of intubated patients: effective??

One of the odd things about contact precautions is that they are typically used to isolate patients colonized or infected with MDROs like MRSA. What this does is protect the healthcare worker from being contaminated with the MDRO but does little to protect the uncolonized patients.  The contact "event" we should MOST care about is contact between the contaminated or colonized healthcare worker and the uncolonized patient. So, current active detection and isolation programs have it all wrong. Please read that paragraph again.

Thus, I read with interest a paper just e-published in the JHI by Matsushima et al.  The authors noticed, using surveillance data, that ventilated patients in their ICU were 8 times as likely to acquire MRSA compared to non-ventilated patients.  Based on this finding they decided to place all ventilated patients on contact precautions throughout their stay to see if it reduced MRSA acquisition.  This intervention is close to a universal contact precautions intervention (or close to the STAR*ICU study that was a study of barrier precautions - gloves or gowns/gloves).

The study was completed in a 19-bed ICU in Osaka, Japan.  A unique (for the US at least) characteristic of this ICU was that only 2 rooms were single-bed rooms while the remaining 17 beds were in a single open ward. There were 2 study periods.  Period 1 occurred during 2004 and period 2 was a 3-year period from 2005-2007. During period 1, contact precautions were only used if the patients was found to be colonized with an MDRO. Surveillance cultures were obtained on all admissions and weekly using sputum, nasal and urine sources. During period 2, the same practices existed as period 1, but all patients who were intubated were placed on contact precautions for their entire stay.  MRSA acquisition occurred when a patient negative for MRSA on admission culture became positive on a subsequent surveillance or clinical culture.  They actually completed segmented Poisson regression looking for changes in slope/intercept of HA-MRSA rates. Woo woo!

The main difference between period 1 and period 2 was that many more people were placed on contact precautions during period 2. In period 1, 2.9% of patients were MRSA+ on admission and isolated while in period 2, 6.1% of patients were MRSA+ on admission, but fully 43% of patients were placed on contact precautions. Importantly, the colonization pressure was 2x greater in period 2.  Keep that in mind...

Interestingly, HA-MRSA infection in all patients declined from 3.6 to 2.3 per 1000 patient-days, p<0.05. The incidence of HA-MRSA in the intubated patients greatly decreased from 12.2% to 1.1%. I have pasted the key figure -->.  What it shows is that while HA-MRSA colonization and infection declined in intubated patients it actually slightly increased in non-intubated patients (who could be considered a non-equivalent control group).  Very cool.

Usual caveats: single center with somewhat unique bed arrangement in the ICU, and of course the control group wasn't random.  However, this is a fairly strong quasi-experimental study with good epi and statistical methods. And it points out that isolating patients actually PROTECTS them, so if there are downsides associated with contact precautions, like fewer visits from healthcare workers, at least the patients isolated directly benefit from the isolation.  This sort of study could actually help flip how we think about contact precautions. Isolate the uncolonized!

Matsushima et al. JHI 2011, doi:101016/j.jhin.2011.02.010

h/t Marin Schweizer

More Chlorhexidine Love

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, another study extols the benefits of the compound we all love, chlorhexidine (CHG). We’ve posted before about the many uses of CHG, including its use as “source control” (bathing patients to reduce bacterial burden, to decrease both transmission and infection risk). The data on source control have to this point been from ICU settings (and, to be fair, not all the data suggest effectiveness, and concerns regarding CHG resistance are valid).

Now, the Rhode Island group has examined the impact of CHG bathing on general wards as well. Using a quasi-experimental study design, the investigators performed daily soap and water bathing of all patients on four general medical wards for one year, and then used daily CHG bathing for the next year (13 months, actually). The composite rate of MRSA and VRE healthcare associated infections (HAIs) was reduced by 64% during the intervention period. Interestingly, nearly the entire difference in infection rates was accounted for by UTIs (10 in the pre- vs. 2 in the post-intervention period). Nosocomial bloodstream infection rates were exactly the same pre and post (5 MRSA and 1 VRE BSI during each time period). Clostridium difficile incidence was unchanged over the time course of the study, serving as a nonequivalent dependent variable (to assess for confounders that might be associated with a general decline in HAI rates).

Given the quasi-experimental design, small size (few HAI events), lack of a concurrent control group, etc., these data require confirmation from a larger controlled trial. I also think the study would be more persuasive if the effect was seen across all body sites, rather than UTI alone. Enough of this unromantic nitpicking—go out and buy your valentine a big bottle of CHG!

Daily chlorhexidine in SICU for CLABSI prevention? Not so much.

A nice report is out in Intensive Care Medicine by Kyle Popovich and collegues from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. In the RUMC SICU the clinicians decided to start using 2% CHG-impregnated clothes in Fall 2005.  The investigators analyzed CLABSI rates using the time-series data in the before period (Sept 2004-October 2005) and after period (November 2005 - October 2006). 

They found no significant difference in the CLABSI rate after the introduction of CHG clothes (3.81/ 1,000 central line days vs. 4.6/1,000 central line days; p = 0.57). A couple things to note.  The first is that they did a great job identifying their study as a quasi-experimental study and using Poisson regression and segmented regression analyses. They reported the Poisson-regression results after segmented regression did not identify changes in slope or intercept around the time of the CHG cloth introduction.  Nice job!  They also used C. diff, BSI, VAP and UTI rates as "control" variables, as they are thought not to be reduced with CHG bathing.  These 'control' variables are called 'non-equivalent dependent variables' and inclusion of these types of "outcomes" improves the internal validity of quasi-experimental studies since they typically would be reduced by other infection prevention interventions but not the intervention under study. Thus, they help rule out the impact of concurrent interventions that could have biased the study findings.

Previous studies, which were also mostly quasi-experimental studies but in MICUs, have found reduced CLABSIs with CHG.  It's great that the authors spent the time writing up and publishing these results and the journal should also be commended.  There's nothing worse than publication bias; negative studies are just as important as positive ones, even if they make decision making more difficult.  The authors concluded that they would not recommend routine use of CHG baths in SICUs; I would recommend further study.

Popovich, et al. Intensive Care Medicine

Benefits of Universal Gloving

Last but not least in the May issue of ICHE, Gonzalo Bearman and our very own Mike Edmond from VCU in Richmond, completed a nice quasi-experimental study looking at the benefits of universal gloving for all patient contact vs. standard contact precautions in their 18-bed surgical ICU. In phase 1 from September '07 to March '08, only standard contact precautions based on passive (clinical culture-directed) surveillance were used while in phase 2 from March '08 to Sept '08 universal gloving with emollient-impregnated gloves was used without contact precautions. During both phases, admission and every 4 day surveillance cultures were performed for MRSA and VRE but for study purposes only and not shared with the clinical teams.

So what happened? Only good things. Universal gloving compliance was 78% in phase 2 and was associated with higher hand hygiene compliance on entry (5% higher) and exit (12% higher). It also appears that universal gloving was associated with reduced CLABSI and catheter-UTIs, but with p-values = 0.1 for both outcomes. C. difficile was also lower (2.0/1,000 patient-days down to 1.4/1,000) but this finding was not statistically significant, p=0.53. VAP rates were the same (1.0 vs 1.1/1000 device days) The most important finding, in my opinion, was that HCW were less likely to have MRSA and VRE contaminating their hands during the universal glove phase. Despite what the authors state (Mike don't be mad!), the study was not likely powered sufficiently to find reduced acquisition, given that MRSA acquisition was reduced by 50% with universal glove (2.9/1000 patient-days vs. 1.4/1000 patient days) but this had a p=0.2.

I think overall, that these findings suggest that universal gloving shows promise warranting further study. I wonder if they stopped universal gloving after the study period? If they did, this would make for a very epidemiologically sound quasi-study (roll-in and roll-out) which could be analyzed using more powerful segmented Poisson regression,which can detect a change in slope and intercept associated with starting or stopping the intervention.

The June ICHE just appeared online 5 minutes ago...more exciting evidence for us to review!

iPad as a metaphor for the future of infection prevention

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. This is perhaps because I'm between jobs and have some occasional downtime but it's more likely the result of not actually owning a computer these past two weeks, unless you count my phone. What I've been thinking about is why I ended up in hospital epidemiology in the first place. I mean, who, in their right mind, would choose to go into a profession that is under appreciated, under funded and lacks the proper scientific data to make rational clinical decisions. I could go on, and I'd be happy to if you meet me at the local pub...

What keeps sticking in my head is how little we've advanced since Semmelweis described the benefits of hand disinfection. For one, we're still doing quasi-experimental studies, although Semmelweis's design was at least controlled (midwives). It also seems that most of our contentious debates, including those around active detection and isolation, would be unnecessary if we'd followed his advice and had 100% hand hygiene. As for recent advances, the CLABSI checklist popularized by Peter Pronovost is probably the most important. Why was this advance made by someone who wasn't an ID physician or hospital epidemiologist? I think it's because as a profession we're stuck. Perhaps more clinical trials will advance things, but I have this suspicion we'll just end up proving what we already know - where will the advancement come from?

So, what does this have to do with the iPad? I just came across this article by Daniel Eran Dilger on how Steve Jobs utilizes creative destruction to change the world. The article is a little tech heavy and perhaps Apple biased, but I don't think that detracts from it's main points which I believe have relevance for a potential 'new' future for infection prevention. Dilger's main points are: (1) "Jobs understands death as a creative force better than most people. For society, culture, and technology to progress, old thinking has to die off to make way for fresh new ideas. People who don’t die are dragged kicking and screaming in the future..." and more importantly (2) "When something works, you don’t need to kill it. But in some cases you should."

So what does this mean for infection prevention and what should be "killed off"? I don't know. It's only been two weeks! However, I think we need to discuss what old ideas we are unnecessarily holding on to and we shouldn't back away from killing off things that work. Yes this is easier said than done and is perhaps a useless exercise. I'm just one guy, I don't even own a computer and I'm not even sure I know what a metaphor is.