We are right in the middle of the flu season, when more and more tests come back positive for the influenza virus. Next to the common cold, there's probably no more familiar illness than the seasonal flu: If you don't get it, someone you know does. Despite this familiarity, there are some fascinating facts about the flu that most of us do not know. Learning about influenza reveals a global network of researchers whose daily work keeps this virus at bay.
Erica Mitchell
Recent Posts
Frankincense and Myrrh... and Copper? Early Biocidal Materials Fit for a King
by Erica Mitchell | December 24 2023
In the traditional Christmas story from the New Testament, three Magi arrived from the East with three gifts for the newborn Jesus: Frankincense, myrrh, and gold. These were precious, rare substances in the ancient world. While revered for their ceremonial uses, the resins frankincense and myrrh were also one of the first biocidal substances used in ancient times. In today's post, we'll look at how nature has provided us with many anti-pathogenic gifts that science is only now beginning to understand.
Over the past years, and with an uptick since COVID, the acronym "ESG" has been popping up in discussions related to investing, corporate values, and public accountability. Is a focus on "Environment, Social, and Governance" a new idea? How has the increased scrutiny affected the healthcare industry? And most specifically, how does it apply to the field of infection control and prevention?
Cross-Functional Hospital Rooms and Infection Control: New Ideas, New Challenges
by Erica Mitchell | December 11 2023
Ever since the COVID pandemic, hospitals have become more adept at thinking outside the box, or rather, outside the patient room. For some hospitals, the pandemic meant converting waiting rooms into treatment rooms, while for others, it meant finding ways to access shared spaces without sharing germs. This experience, plus the added financial pressures faced by healthcare, is accelerating a trend for more cross-functional, multipurpose rooms in healthcare facilities. How will this trend intersect with infection control protocols? Let's try to foresee some potential benefits and risks.
In the sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, an omnipresent computer named HAL monitors all activity aboard a spacecraft on a critical mission. The single-mindedness of this artificial intelligence makes HAL helpful and life-saving, but misses the mark on some decisions that require a more human touch. While our year 2023 has not yet brought us interstellar craft equipped with AI, we are living in a time when technology is supporting almost every field, including healthcare. This post will explore how technology is helping us with hand-hygiene compliance, and how, like HAL, there are some clear advantages as well as some disadvantages. (Thankfully, no hand hygiene technology is able to eject non-compliers out the airlock. Yet.)
Making the Case for Healthcare Innovation, Part 3: The Business Case
by Erica Mitchell | December 4 2023
After you make the case for the healthcare innovation in terms of patient and facility benefits, anticipating possible risks, and demonstrating efficacy, the final step is to put all that data into financial terms. To calculate return on investment, you will need to determine, to the best degree possible, the costs of implementation, the potential costs of not implementing, and make connections to the facility and/or system plan for the future. In today's post, we will guide you to resources to help you accomplish these tasks.
For those of us who live where winters can be cold, we may be finding ourselves wrapping ourselves up more as we go out, bundling up to stay cozy inside, and generally getting ourselves situated to make it through the cold season. We are reacting to our environment, just as bears prepare to hibernate, and birds prepare to migrate. Microorganisms react to their environment as well, with some bacteria having the ability to produce spores in order to survive outside a host. In today's post, we will examine one such bacterial spore, one that causes hundreds of thousands of infections each year and tens of thousands of deaths: Clostridioides difficile.
In our series on Clostridioides difficile, we explored the bacteria that causes this lethal hospital-acquired infection, the resulting infectious disease, and the outlook for treatment and prevention. This Thanksgiving week we are providing a shorter read and offering this one-page infographic that presents the highlights of this series on one shareable page. The cycle of infection as well as the lifecycle of the microorganisms are presented in relation to each other, with the added element of where either of those cycles can be broken, preventing an outbreak.
Making the Case for a Healthcare Innovation (Part 2): Assessing Risk
by Erica Mitchell | November 20 2023
Assessing the potential risks and benefits is an important step before proposing a new product or program for your facility. You need to anticipate all the possible things that could go wrong alongside the things you believe will go right. In today's post, we will examine what types of risks to identify and how they might impact your facility.