LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Infections: Patients
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In this study overall, posaconazole was successful in treating a wide variety of refractory fungal infections. Importantly, posaconazole demonstrated activity against three particularly life-threatening fungi: Aspergillus, Fusarium and Zygomycetes, organisms responsible for causing invasive infections in immunocompromised patient populations. Against invasive aspergillosis, a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with hematological malignancies, such as patients undergoing stem cell transplants, the overall success rate of posaconazole was significantly higher than in the control group (42% vs. 26%, p=0.006). With Fusarium and Zygomycetes, less known but increasingly common and deadly pathogens, the overall success rates with posaconazole were 39% and 56%, respectively. These results are particularly important as these patients had failed one or more previous therapies. In the study, posaconazole was generally well-tolerated, with the most common side effects being GI in origin (nausea, vomiting and diarrhea), and mild to moderate in severity.
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Cardinal Health is deploying a new MRSA Scorecard to hospitals that monitor infections using the company's MedMined(TM) services. The new scorecard provides a hospital-wide view of MRSA, allowing infection control practitioners to track the types and locations of MRSA infections throughout the hospital. The MRSA Scorecard uses Cardinal Health's patent-pending Nosocomial Infection Marker (NIM) methodology, which allows hospitals to identify patients who have tested positive for the bacteria and distinguish between those who likely acquired the infection in the hospital. Through this real-time view, hospitals can rapidly dispatch resources to limit the spread of infections.
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Healthcare-associated infections are estimated to be the fifth-leading cause of death in the U.S., after heart disease, cancer, stroke, and pneumonia or influenza. The CDC estimates that nearly two million Americans a year acquire healthcare-associated infections. There are several types of healthcare-associated infections -- of these, blood stream infections are the most costly and life-threatening, resulting in an increase in mortality rate of 18 percent when compared to patients without a blood stream infection. Leading researchers have estimated that more than 400,000 blood stream infections occur each year in the U.S. alone. Healthcare-acquired blood stream infections cost an average of $34,000 in increased direct hospital costs and can increase patient length-of-stays by 23 days. Many hospitals and other healthcare facilities have developed extensive control programs to prevent the occurrence of infections.
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This article reports that many skin or muscle infections that require hospitalization originate from microbes acquired in a clinic, hospital, or other medical-care setting. The infections typically followed trauma, surgery, or an invasive medical procedure such as kidney dialysis. People with such infections were three times as likely to die in the hospital as were patients whose infections originated outside the medical setting, says physician Benjamin A. Lipsky of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. Reading Level (Lexile): 1350;
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Respiratory tract infections due to E coli are uncommon and are almost always associated with E coli UTI. No virulence factors have been implicated. E coli pneumonia may ... result from microaspiration of upper airway secretions that have been previously colonized with this organism in severely ill patients; hence, it is a cause of nosocomial pneumonia. However, E coli pneumonia can also be community-acquired in patients who have underlying disease such as diabetes mellitus, alcoholism, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and E coli UTI. E coli pneumonia usually manifests as a bronchopneumonia of the lower lobes and may be complicated by empyema. E coli bacteremia precedes pneumonia and is usually due to another focus of E coli infection in the urinary or GI tract.
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Combination antibiotic therapy has been used as the treatment of choice for certain stubborn bacterial infections. Two prime examples are tuberculosis and gastric ulcer disease, caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection and Helicobacter pylori infection, respectively. In both of these examples, the rifamycins rifampin and rifabutin have been used because of their potency against these pathogens. However, these rifamycins share the negative attribute of eliciting drug-drug interactions; that is, they interfere with the actions of many other medications that the patient may require. The NCEs are breakthrough drug candidates because they have not been shown preclinically to engender drug-drug interactions caused by the other rifamycins. In addition the NCEs have equal or superior potency compared with rifampin.
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