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The CDC Foundation explains that public health is “the science of protecting and improving the health of families and communities through promotion of healthy lifestyles, research for disease and injury prevention and detection and control of infectious diseases.” It adds that “Public health professionals try to prevent problems from happening or recurring through implementing educational programs, recommending policies, administering services and conducting research – in contrast to clinical professionals like doctors and nurses, who focus primarily on treating individuals after they become sick or injured. Public health also works to limit health disparities. A large part of public health is promoting healthcare equity, quality and accessibility.”

Hospital food service infection control experts have a lot on their plates, as it were, when it comes to ensuring patients’ well-being. That responsibility has not let up in 2016; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) keeps pushing medical institutions to offer healthier fare – think fresh, not prepackaged, salads; Chipotle’s produce-linked food poisoning outbreak lingers in recent memory; and the Zika virus’s entrance into the United States raises questions about its impact on areas including food safety. Each of these issues should reinforce to hospital food infection control experts the need to stay mindful of industry best practices. Doing so will continue to help protect patients, says Marisa Pinchas, MPH, CIC, the infection preventionist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Construction or renovation projects in the healthcare environment can pose moderate to significant risks of particulate-borne disease trans-mission, so experts emphasize the need for control measures as part of a risk-mitigation plan.

While not every instance of healthcare-associated infection (HAI) can be pinned on staff hygiene, too many occurrences can be attributed to the very people who are supposed to protect patients. And that is why the reality of insufficient attention to handwashing, PPE donning and doffing, and other areas of infection prevention, remains so baffling.  The big question is “why” – why do some staff cut corners when they well know the consequences of not adhering to standard processes for basic hand hygiene and activities such as PPE donning/doffing? The answers vary but often boil down to one simple reality: human nature. People get in a hurry and take the chance that no one is watching them, says Mary Lou Love, MSN, RN, the veteran director of infection control for Doctors Hospital at Renaissance in Edinburg, Texas. For starters, people generally adhere to requirements for a while and then fall back into their old ways. “I think, like anything else, you start off, then get to the point that it is working, and then a couple of months go by,” Love explains. Since infection control – which has limited resources – tends to oversee compliance monitoring on a regular basis people “go back to their habits” without constant enforcement, Love says.

Outbreaks of infectious diseases, caused by harmful pathogens, can be traced back centuries as the cause of significant morbidity and mor-tality in humans. The previous century saw two of medicine’s biggest achievements: the introduction of vaccinations to prevent infections and the use of antibiotics to cure infections when they do occur. Preventing and curing infections remain key goals of medicine in providing optimal health for a population. But growing antibiotic resistance and community-acquired infections are on the rise. It’s important to take a closer look at these growing trends.

The World Health Organization WHO is currently warning of an antibiotics crisis. The fear is that we are moving into a post-antibiotic era, during which simple bacterial infections would no longer be treatable. According to WHO forecasts, antibiotic-resistant pathogens could become the most frequent cause of unnatural deaths within just a few years. This dramatic threat to public health is due to the rapid evolution of resistance to antibiotics, which continues to reduce the spectrum of effective antibacterial drugs. We urgently need new treatments. In addition to developing new antibiotic drugs, a key strategy is to boost the effectiveness of existing antibiotics by new therapeutic approaches.

For the purposes of this report, ICT conducted an online survey in which several hundred infection preventionists shared their insights on key issues such as workload, present and future challenges, as well as program needs and areas for improvement. When we asked respondents how they felt about the future of their profession overall, 56 percent said they were excited and optimistic about what can be accomplished, 28 percent said they were feeling neutral and withholding judgment for now, and 16 percent said they felt cautious and/or pessimistic in the face of continued change within the profession and healthcare in general. Eighty-five percent of surveyed IPs say they are confident in their compe-tency as an infection preventionist, while 5 percent were not and 10 percent were unsure. And in terms of enjoying their work, 91 percent of IPs said they were happy in their jobs, while 4 percent said they did not relish their tasks and 6 percent were ambivalent.

When a patient is prescribed the wrong antibiotic to treat a bacterial infection, it's not necessarily the physician who is at fault. The current antibiotic assay -- standardized in 1961 by the World Health Organization and used worldwide -- is potentially flawed. So says UC Santa Barbara biologist Michael Mahan, whose lab has developed a new antimicrobial susceptibility test that could transform the way antibiotics are developed, tested and prescribed.

The bacteria in a child’s gut appears to be influenced as early as its first year by ethnicity and breastfeeding, according to a new study from McMaster University. And while stable gut bacteria, called microbiota, may not be established until one to three years after birth, the infant gut bacteria seems to be an important indicator of immune function, nutrient metabolism and could offer protection from pathogens. The study was recently published in Genome Medicine.

Before Ebola virus ever struck West Africa, locals were already on the lookout for a deadly pathogen: Lassa virus. With thousands dying from Lassa every year-and the potential for the virus to cause even larger outbreaks-researchers are committed to designing a vaccine to stop it. Now, a team led by staff scientist Kathryn Hastie and professor Erica Ollmann Saphire at the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has solved the structure of the viral machinery that Lassa virus uses to enter human cells. Their study, published June 2, 2017 in the journal Science, is the first to show a key piece of the viral structure, called the surface glycoprotein, for any member of the deadly arenavirus family.

The call came from the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general in May 2016 for a renewed attack on the global spread of vector-borne diseases.

The vaccine for the human papillomavirus (HPV) is proving to have significant population-level effects in Connecticut, with rates of precancerous lesions caused by HPV down drastically among young women, a new Yale School of Public Health study finds.

Subgroups of tuberculosis (TB)-causing bacteria can persist even when antibiotics wipe out most of the overall population. The need to eliminate these persistent subpopulations is one reason why TB treatment regimens are so lengthy. Now, researchers have shown that a single protein allows mycobacteria to generate diverse populations that can avoid TB drugs. The protein may be a target for intervention; blocking it might result in less mycobacterial diversity and shorten TB treatment courses. The research was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health.

Surviving the treacherous journey through the human body from the mouth to the colon takes a special kind of bacterial pathogen. Shigella - a group of bacteria responsible for much of the diarrheal disease affecting children in the developing world - travels unimpeded from the mouth to the colon, where they unleash powerful machinery to trigger debilitating diarrhea. Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have been looking not only at how Shigella survives this journey but also how it takes advantage of substances that would kill many less persistent organisms. Each year Shigella is responsible for at least 80 million infections and approximately 700,000 deaths worldwide. Long-term effects for Shigella survivors can include impaired physical and cognitive development, poor gastrointestinal health, reactive arthritis or kidney damage depending on the strain causing infection. Although 99 percent of cases occur in developing nations, approximately half a million occur in the U.S. each year.

Princeton researchers have developed a way to place onto surfaces special coatings that chemically "communicate" with bacteria, telling them what to do. The coatings, which could be useful in inhibiting or promoting bacterial growth as needed, possess this controlling power over bacteria because, in effect, they "speak" the bugs' own language.

Real-time imaging of influenza infection in mice is a promising new method to quickly monitor disease progression and to evaluate whether candidate vaccines and treatments are effective in this animal model, according to National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists. A group from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) evaluated the live imaging system as a potential alternative to traditional methods of assessing investigative influenza vaccines and treatment in mice, which can be time consuming and require more study animals for valid statistical comparison.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine report new evidence that immune cells infected with a latent form of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) are able to proliferate, replenishing the reservoir of virus that is resistant to antiretroviral drug therapy. Although HIV can be controlled with therapy in most cases, the proliferation of such reservoir cells pose a persistent barrier to developing a cure for HIV, researchers say.

Researchers have developed a new, rapid biosensor for the early detection of even tiny concentrations of the human influenza A (H1N1) virus. Such early-stage diagnosis is crucial for averting a potential pandemic outbreak, as antiviral medication must be administered in a timely fashion. Conventional tests for detecting the flu virus are often slow and expensive, and can miss early viral infections. In contrast, the new biosensor measures tiny changes in voltage in an electrically conductive polymer to quickly detect virus concentrations almost 100 times smaller than the limit of currently available kits. The work was done at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU), in a collaboration between the Institute of Biomaterials and Bioengineering and the Department of Molecular Virology.

The quest to develop a cure for HIV has long been plagued by a seemingly simple question: How do doctors determine if someone is cured? The virus has a knack for lying dormant in immune cells at levels undetectable to all but the most expensive and time-consuming tests. Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health announced today in Nature Medicine that they've created a test sensitive enough to detect "hidden" HIV, and yet is faster, less labor-intensive and less expensive than the current "gold standard" test.