HWN Suggests

Fighting Pneumonia at the Hospital

The humble toothbrush can help prevent pathogens that enter the mouth from traveling down the esophagus and into the trachea and lungs.

You go to the hospital with a broken arm, then end up with a potentially lethal case of pneumonia. A recent study in the American Journal of Infection Control calls this scenario entirely too common — and one faced by more than just the most vulnerable patients, such as older people, in the intensive care unit.

“We found that pneumonia was occurring in all patients on all types of units,” says lead author Dian Baker, a professor in the School of Nursing at California State University in Sacramento. “We sort of thought the elderly, the very…

read full article

Featured

  How clean is your hospital room? To reduce the spread of infections, it could probably be cleaner

Unknown to you, the last patient in your room had an infection caused by a multi-drug resistant pathogen (bug) – meaning the standard antibiotics can’t fight it. Unfortunately, research suggests if you are admitted to a room where the last patient had this kind of infection, you are significantly more likely to be infected by that same pathogen than if you were admitted to a room where the last patient wasn’t infected.

 In Hospitals, Pneumonia Is a Lethal Enemy

Pneumonia is the No. 1 hospital-acquired infection in America and hospitals aren’t doing enough to fight it. The best weapon: a toothbrush.

Articles of Interest

Get ready for a future where antibiotics no longer work

Some pneumonia is becoming resistant to what's usually the last line of treatment available.

Healthcare-associated Pneumonia and Aspiration Pneumonia

This review focused on the definition, prevalence and role of aspiration pneumonia as a prognostic factor in published studies of HCAP and attempted to identify problems associated with the concept of aspiration pneumonia.

Healthcare-associated Pneumonia: Clinical Features and Retrospective Analysis Over 10 Years

Healthcare-associated pneumonia (HCAP) is associated with drug-resistant pathogens and high mortality, and there is no clear evidence that this is due to inappropriate antibiotic therapy. This study was to elucidate the clinical features, pathogens, therapy, and outcomes of HCAP, and to clarify the risk factors for drug-resistant pathogens and prognosis.

Hospital-Acquired Infections: Beating Back the Bugs

It is the ultimate paradox of American health care: going to the hospital can kill you. Every year nearly two million hospital-acquired infections claim roughly 100,000 lives and add $45 billion in costs; that is as many lives and dollars as taken by AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined. And with antibiotic resistance rising steadily, those numbers promise to climb even higher.

How American Health Care Killed My Father

Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals.

Reducing Preventable Harm in Hospitals

Each year, in the United States, millions of patients are harmed while receiving care in hospitals. They get infections, experience adverse reactions to drugs, develop dangerous bed sores, or come down with pneumonia from the very ventilators meant to help them breathe.