According to Dr. Meghan Lyman, lead author of a study on the rapid increase of Candida auris cases in the United States, there are 4 action items needed to address this growing threat. In today's post, we will look at how the US is rising to the challenge, and what could still be done to help keep our most vulnerable citizens safe.
Whenever a product with EPA-registered Public Health Claims puts those claims in writing, you'll see an * or t after the word bacteria or germs. For example, "XYZ kills >99.9% of harmful bacteria* in under two hours." You'll find this on the labels of cleaning products in your home, as well as on industrial strength cleaners found in hospitals or other healthcare facilities. What does it mean?
Almost every country has a government agency responsible for the health and safety of its citizens and its environment. Where those two departments overlap is often where pesticides and germicides are regulated. At this intersection are those chemicals that, if released into the environment, could cause damage, but which, within healthcare facilities, are required in order to kill dangerous pathogens. In today's post, we'll explore two such departments in neighboring nations, the United States and Canada.
In our previous posts about DALYs and QALYs, we have defined the terms and presented how the healthcare field calculates these two measures of disease burden. In today's post, we will narrow our view to just hospital-associated infections and their disease burden. After reading this post, you should have a more detailed picture of the impact HAIs have on American lives.
An Environmental Protection Agency's Registered Public Health Claim is the agency’s highest standard for products hoping to make statements regarding their impact on harmful bacteria and, as a result, the reduction in the bioburden. Because the registration permits the product to make statements (claims) about killing microbes that are otherwise harmful to people, the agency has set a very high bar for achieving their registration. The ability to make Public Health Claims is a lengthy process that is difficult to achieve and requires that a product first submit testing protocols for prior approval and then the product itself is submitted for rigorous testing against those protocols to ensure that it is both efficacious and durable.
In the first part of this series, we explored how quality of life is calculated, a complex process used by healthcare researchers as they attempt to prioritize time, energy and funds, with particular emphasis on individual cases. In today's post, we will look at a far less complex measure, Disability Adjusted Life-Years, or DALYs. This measure is used by epidemiologists, health policy-makers, pharmaceutical companies as well as the healthcare industry to inform decisions that affect whole populations of people.
