Month: January 2020
Content from Dr. Razan El Ramahi, originally posted in IDSA journal club. Despite the availability of active antibiotics to treat Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia (SAB), controversy still exists regarding the optimal antibiotic strategy and whether combination antibiotics improve outcomes. In small clinical studies, a possible benefit was observed by adding daptomycin to β-lactams in the treatment of SAB. However, […]
Jan 28, 2020
Novel Coronavirus – What You Need to Know Now
Content courtesy of Dr. Angela Hewlett Coronaviruses are common respiratory pathogens, and generally cause mild symptoms of the ‘common cold’. However, other coronavirus strains have been known to cause outbreaks that lead to more severe disease like pneumonia, and even death. Examples of these include SARS and MERS, which are both coronaviruses with mortality rates […]
Jan 23, 2020
Blood culture contamination–it’s a big deal
Blood cultures are a key diagnostic test to detect bacteremia and appropriately treat patients with sepsis and are performed approximately 30 million times in the United States yearly. Unfortunately, contamination of blood cultures occurs in the 0.5% to 5% of samples (approximately 25% of positive blood cultures are due to contamination) which leads to inappropriate […]
Jan 21, 2020
Antimicrobial Stewardship & Sepsis – A Great Debate
Optimal management of sepsis has long-been a holy grail in medicine. One area that remains fraught with debate is how to effectively balance the need for emergent antimicrobial administration with principles of antimicrobial stewardship. A recent Point–Counterpoint series on “Should Broad-Spectrum Antibiotics Be Routinely Administered to All Patients with Sepsis as Soon as Possible”published in […]
Jan 14, 2020
Surveillance for vascular catheter associated complications in home health care is needed
Content written by Dr. Mark Rupp. Impressive gains in the prevention of central line associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) have been realized in recent years in US hospitals. However, with efforts to improve efficiency and decrease hospital length of stay, patients are increasingly being discharged to home health care to receive intravenous therapy. The rate of […]
Jan 6, 2020
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