As I’m sure many of you know, last night President Obama and ABC News hosted a discussion on the current state of health care in America. That reform is needed was universally supported. Debate, for the most part, centered on how much of a role government should play in delivery of care.

The current recession has been one of the worst economic slumps in recent memory, and hospitals have been not been immune from the slump. Like many businesses today, hospitals have been cutting fixed costs as deeply as they can, and one of the casualties of this cost cutting is infection control, says a recent study from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).

Five years, the work of multitudes and not a little luck, and the Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria—AMFm—is almost open for business with $220 million in the bank.  The five years dates from a 2004 report produced by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), by a committee chaired by Kenneth Arrow the well respected U.S.

We're in Atlanta this weekend, where Extending the Cure and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Get Smart for Healthcare campaign are hosting a meeting on inpatient antimicrobial use.

The goal is optimizing antibiotic use in health care facilities so that susceptible bugs don't become resistant.

About 2 in 3 Medicare beneficiaries who were discharged into the community following hospitalization in 2003 or 2004 were rehospitalized or died within a year, according to a recent New England Journal of Medicine article. Only 10% of the rehospitalizations were estimated to have been planned. This highlights the extent to which patients who enter the healthcare system feed back into it.

In March of 1978 a patient was admitted to the University of Virginia (UVA) Medical Center who was infected with MRSA, a type of antibiotic-resistant staph.