News

A team led by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Public Health has found that methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is prevalent at several U.S. wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). MRSA is well known for causing difficult-to-treat and potentially fatal bacterial infections in hospital patients, but since the late 1990s it has also been infecting otherwise healthy people in community settings.

Long seen as a cost center by healthcare administrators, infection prevention programs have taken a beating when hospital budgets are cut. Infection preventionists are fighting back by making the business case for their programs to fend off additional cost-cutting as well as to demonstrate return on investment (ROI). While infection prevention has always been about patient and healthcare worker safety, it increasingly must show economic dividends -- it's a departure from the purely clinical path that infection preventionists have always taken, but essential for the future viability.