The role of weather, season and climate in HAI

The recent attention given to climate change served as a backdrop to this talk (slides posted below) that I just gave at ICPIC in Geneva. ICPIC has been a wonderful conference and it was a nice forum for discussing the larger, international issues hindering HAI control. I look forward to seeing everyone again in two years.

Top Infection Control Papers - ICPIC 2013 Edition

Andreas Widmer and I had the honor of presenting the "Best" Papers lectures at ICPIC this year. In case we spoke too quickly or you couldn't make it to Geneva this year, we have have posted the slides below. We wish we could have included many more papers since the quality of infection prevention research has increase immensely over the past decade (e.g. Huang's REDUCE MRSA study and Bonten's MOSAR trial).

ICPIC 2013 - 25-28 June 2013 - Geneva

ICPIC 2013 by HUG

I really enjoyed speaking at and attending the 1st International Conference on Prevention & Infection Control (ICPIC) in 2011. It was great opportunity to share the best science and best practices with colleagues from around the world. I hope to see many of you there in 2013.

Oh, and check out the excellent iOS app: here and Android app: here

New #OpenAccess Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control (ARIC) Journal Publishes First Papers

Andreas Voss, Jan Kluytmans and Didier Pittet have successfully started a new international, open-access journal called Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control (ARIC). The first batch of papers were just posted today to the ARIC website.  This event is a significant for several reasons.

The first, as I've mentioned before, is that as an open-access journal, ARIC will allow unaffiliated scientists, the general public and otherwise interested parties free full access immediately upon publication without having to wait years or pay high fees. In an editorial, accompanying the first publications, the editors highlight their views of open access including how they hope to respond to the high initial costs for authors.

They write: "ARIC's choice of "open-access" is a logical step towards its goal to be truly international and to allow the transfer of knowledge and best practices to even remote places that cannot afford printed journals. We realize that open access has financial consequence for some authors and that the standard BioMed Central rules to waive article-processing charges may not be enough. BioMed Central provides an automatic waiver to authors based in any country classified by the World Bank as low-income or lower-middle-income economies, but we intend to find solutions in the near future that will allow us to support authors from upper-middle income countries and young investigators" 

The second and I think equally important reason that ARIC's emergence is important is that we've never had an international voice in infection control. As the 1200 attendees from 84 countries at last summers ICPIC meeting can attest, international collaboration will be the key for controlling antimicrobial-resistant bacterial pathogens (think NDM-1) in the future.


I wish the editors and the ARIC journal much luck and future success!

@eliowa