Tag: #InfectionControl
Excitement Builds for SHEA Spring 2025: Meet the Presenters from Our Division
The SHEA Spring 2025 meeting promises to be a vibrant gathering of thought leaders in healthcare epidemiology and infection prevention. Held from April 26-30, 2025, in beautiful Championsgate, FL, the event will feature groundbreaking research, innovative practices, and insightful discussions. We’re thrilled to highlight the brilliant presenters from our division, each contributing to the advancement of healthcare practices:
Apr 25, 2025
Canine or Cultures: An Alternative Method for Infection Diagnosis?
Sit. Stay. Roll over. Diagnose an infection? It seems that, in addition to being man’s best friend, dogs make pretty good infectious disease doctors. Or at least that’s the conclusion of two recent studies which trained dogs to identify UTIs or C. difficile infections in real patient samples. The results were impressive!
May 31, 2022
Physical Barriers for Prevention Amidst a Pandemic – The Roles of Distancing, Masks and Eye Protection
This study provides early evidence of the efficacy of continued PPE use to prevent transmission of COVID-19, both in the community and in the healthcare setting, including continued physical distancing, facemask use and eye protection.
Jul 14, 2020
How Clean is the Hub?
New UNMC ID publication alert! #ReadUNMCID Recently, several members of the Division of Infectious Diseases at UNMC/Nebraska Medicine published a study in American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC) entitled: Microbial colonization of intravascular catheter connectors in hospitalized patients. Drs. Richard Hankins (former ID fellow, class of 2019), and Kelly Cawcutt (Associate Medical Director of Infection […]
Aug 19, 2019
A Day in the Life of Central Venous Access Devices
This post comes courtesy of Dr. Mark Rupp, who recently published a study in the Journal of Infusion Nursing about outpatient maintenance practices for central venous access devices (CVADs)! Our patients are increasingly receiving intravenous therapy at home via indwelling CVADs. However, limited data exist regarding patients’ experiences with outpatient CVADs. Regina Nailon is the […]
Jun 18, 2019
When you see CRE: Add Equal Parts Antimicrobial Stewardship and Infection Control
The following was previously posted by Dr. Marcelin to SHEA Journal Club published online in April 2019. Dealing with carbapenem resistant organisms presents both an antimicrobial stewardship and infection control problem. Richter et al. aimed to predict risk factors for carbapenem resistance among Gram-negative rods (CR-GNR). The authors were particularly interested in whether differences exist […]
May 2, 2019
Learning Outside of the Comfort Zone
Several months ago, a five-person team from Nebraska Medicine’s Biocontainment Unit traveled to Western Uganda, where they trained refugee health workers on appropriate infection prevention and control practices. Dr. James Lawler, one of our Infectious Diseases Faculty, was the team leader on this trip. Dr. Lawler is the Director of International Programs and Innovation for […]
Mar 18, 2019
Earrings In Healthcare Workers: Friend or Foe?
Ear piercing among people, including healthcare workers, is a common trend. Katsuse et al, attempted to make a correlation between ear piercings and healthcare-associated infections. In order to prove this relationship, researchers sampled the earlobes and fingers of 200 nurses working at a university hospital. 128 of those nurses had pierced earlobes and 72 of […]
Nov 20, 2018
Does the Clostridium Smell Diffy? Even the Dogs Disagree…
The C. difficile sniffing dogs are back! There are several prior reports of individual dogs being trained to “sniff out” C. difficile. In a novel approach, the authors of this study trained two dogs simultaneously, and then compared interrater reliability between sniff attempts. They used toxigenic C. difficile frozen stool samples (GDH EIA and PCR […]
Nov 5, 2018
CRE or not CRE: A Question of Risky Business and Notes from the Field
The following was originally posted by Dr. Marcelin to the August 2018 SHEA Journal Club Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) are not as prevalent in the United States as they are in the Eastern Hemisphere; however travel within our global village means creates opportunity for movement of these organisms to our region. The following is a review of […]
Sep 21, 2018
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