Weekly Rounds with Infection Control Today®

Take 5 minutes to catch up on Infection Control Today®’s highlights for the week ending March 26.

Welcome to the Weekly Rounds with Infection Control Today®! Starting this week, we’ll present 5 highlights from ICT®’s wide-ranging coverage of the infection prevention and control world. Everything from interviews with known opinion leaders, to the news that infection preventionists and other health care professionals can use on their jobs.

Antibiotic Stewardship Programs Need Infection Preventionists

Arjun Srinivasan, MD, the associate director for health care association infection prevention programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention talks to ICT® about the CDC’s ambitious new effort to cut down on overprescribing of antibiotics at hospitals by 90%.

With Personal Protective Equipment, 1 Size Does Not Fit All

One of the problems with personal protective equipment (PPE) is that only about a quarter of the PPE out there has been made to fit women, says Beau Wangtrakuldee, PhD. Wangtrakuldee tells ICT® that there are other issues, as well. For instance, hospitals “are trying to figure out how to reuse and recycle protective apparel that works as well as disposables. There are a few benefits to that. For one, reusable and recyclable products could be made and sourced here in the U.S. where we have resources to make that available.”

Nurses Most Likely to Spread Microbes, Says Study

Nurses are more likely to be super spreaders of pathogens because they work so hard, say investigators with the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands. Nurses are all over the place, moving from patient room to patient room and throughout wards. Educating nurses and other health care professionals about how best to maintain good hand hygiene, and also where best to put alcohol-based hand disinfectants can help address this situation.

How COVID-19 Spread the Word About Infection Prevention

Sharon Ward-Fore, MS, MT(ASCP), CIC, a member of ICT®’s Editorial Advisory Board, tells us that “we’ve learned the hard way that restaurants, office settings, hair salons, fitness centers, and schools have really suffered for the lack of guidance by professionals like infection preventionists.” That presents a problem, however. There are not enough IPs to go around to fill the growing need in health care, let alone non-health care settings.

At-Home COVID-19 Tests Called ‘Staggeringly’ Effective

In their methodology, investigators included almost every possible reason why the at-home COVID-19 tests should not make a difference—and yet conclude that those tests would in fact make a huge difference. They urge readers to focus less on the numbers and more on their conclusion that a nationwide rollout of at-home tests would make both economic and medical sense.