I've spent the past several days in Atlanta participating in a conference on healthcare-associated infections that only happens once every 10 years. The meeting is hosted by SHEA (Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America), CDC, as well as infection organizations IDSA and APIC and runs until Monday.

I'm not sure of the exact count, but there have to be several thousand people here from all over the world who have many different perspectives on how to address the problem of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), which are often preventable.

In a plenary address Thursday night, Thomas Frieden, the head of CDC outlined some general priorities for his agency in addressing HAIs. These included increased surveillance of HAIs, increased adherence to evidenced-based practices, and further work to address gaps in knowledge. These priorities are hard to argue with and may be productive points of focus for CDC. The success of this agenda of course depends on how well these priorities are implemented to produce practical improvements in our understanding of trends in and burden of the HAI problem as well as eventual improvements in incentives to reduce the incidence of preventable adverse events.

Frieden also promised that CDC is working on making data reported to its confidential network of hospitals more publicly available in response to an inquiry from Consumer Reports. CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network collects data on HAIs from many hospitals across the United States, and journal articles and reports published using data from this network of hospitals have provided very useful information to the health community. Unfortunately, only CDC has access to these data, and CDC has published only a limited subset of information from the network that would be useful to health researchers. Greater access to these data would be very useful.

Johan Giesecke of the European CDC gave an interesting talk during the same session on the agenda of the European community to address HAIs and antibiotic resistance. Some interesting but bleak statistics from his talk included that 80% of physicians recently surveyed had seen 10 or more patients in the last 6 months with infections resistant to all beta-lactam antibiotics and a further 14% had seen some patients with these extremely resistant infections. Giesecke commented on how patients with these extremely resistant often have to be treated with antibiotics that are toxic.

Extending the Cure researchers have been busy giving several presentations as well. We gave a poster presentation showing that antibiotic resistance among two important hospital pathogens, E. coli and Klebsiella, is increasing but in different ways among these organisms that have been assumed to be quite similar. I also just finished giving an oral presentation on seasonality of Gram-negative hospital-associated infections (showing that there are more infections in summer compared to winter months). These results have some interesting implications, but since we're still working on these projects, I'll save further commentary for a later time.