Hospital’s Superbug Outbreak Calls Into Question New Prevention Plan
Some wonder if the regulations hospitals have adopted to avoid the outbreaks are actually doing more harm than good.
Los Angeles Times:
UCI Doctor’s Plan To Stop Superbugs Is Widely Used. At Her Own Hospital, It Didn’t Work
By the end of December, a lethal bacterium had swept through UC Irvine Medical Center’s intensive care unit, sickening seven infants. Dr. Susan Huang, the hospital’s infection control expert, had a plan. The strategy — which she had promoted so successfully that most U.S. hospitals now use it — included bathing all infants in the ICU with a powerful disinfectant, and swabbing inside their noses with an antibiotic. But this time, the plan failed. (Petersen, 5/16)
In other hospital news —
The Bakersfield Californian:
Radiologists Perform First-Of-Its-Kind Liver Cancer Treatment At San Joaquin Community Hospital, Marking A Milestone For Kern County
Imagine a microcatheter as skinny as a needle. Now imagine threading that through an artery the diameter of a spaghetti noodle. That’s the precision required for a procedure interventional radiologists at San Joaquin Community Hospital performed on a 70-year-old man last week called radioembolization. It’s an intervention treatment for liver cancer that stops or slows the growth of a tumor, buying patients more time to wait on transplant lists, and in some cases, making them candidates for surgery to have the tumor removed entirely. The procedure has been performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other large U.S. cities, but when doctors at San Joaquin Community Hospital finished last week, it marked a milestone for Kern County, hospital officials said. (Pierce, 5/16)