At the recent Michigan Society of Hospital Central Service Personnel (MSHCSP) Conference held in Sterling Heights, Mich., Healthmark Industries announced that Mary Velasco is the winner of the IAHCSMM’s 2014 Anne Cofiell Decontaminator of the Year Award. Velasco is the CSSD manager at Henry Ford Macomb Hospital and has more than 35 years of experience in the sterile processing field, including as past-president of MSHCSP.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s Checklist for Prevention of Central Line Associated Blood Stream Infections (CLABSI) lists as its No. 1 task for clinicians: Perform daily audits as to whether each central line is still needed. However, if the daily audit is not done with a clear and current knowledge of what constitutes a valid indication for central venous access, and if that knowledge is not acted on promptly, what’s the point?
Standard terminal cleaning of hospital rooms is a fundamental Infection Prevention process performed by the Environment of Care staff. It is defined as physical cleaning followed by disinfection with an approved hospital disinfectant. Monitoring consistency of this process, however,is difficult and not assured. There can be as many variations of the process as there is staff performing the task. It is not unusual that significant residual bacteria are left in place.Alternative disinfection technology utilizing a product derived from saline and electricity, "superoxidized water," produces a cidal activity 50-100 times that of household bleach, addressing growing resistance issues of standard terminal cleaning agents. Electrolyzed sodium hypochlorous acid (HOCL), produces an efficient disinfecting adjunct to standard terminal cleaning and provides many advantages in optimizing infection prevention in the hospital environment. The wand spray device distributes the product in a sequential back and forth motion producing a uniform distribution of the powder coating to all areas of the environment. Due to the neutral pH of the HOCL, it is non-toxic, does not leave residue on environmental surfaces, and is not corrosive to hospital equipment as traditional bleach and phenolics have long demonstrated.
Research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggests that exposure to specific combinations of allergens and bacteria within the first year of life may protect children from wheezing and allergic disease. These observations come from the Urban Environment and Childhood Asthma (URECA) study, which aims to identify factors responsible for asthma development in children from inner-city settings, where the disease is more prevalent and severe. Since 2005, the URECA study has enrolled 560 children from four cities-Baltimore, Boston, New York and St. Louis. The children all have at least one parent with asthma or allergies, placing them at high risk for developing asthma. The study is following the children from birth, and the current publication evaluates the group through three years of age.
Between May 29 and June 1, 2014, 37 new cases and 21 new deaths were reported from the following 5 districts: Conakry, 3 new cases and 0 deaths; Gueckedou, 11 new cases and 13 deaths; Macenta, 4 new cases and 1 death; Telimele, 19 new cases and 5 deaths; and Boffa, 0 new cases and 2 deaths. The cumulative number of cases and deaths attributable to EVD in Guinea is now 328 (laboratory confirmed 193, probable 80, and suspected 55) including 208 deaths. The geographical distribution of these cases and deaths is as follows: Conakry, 56 cases and 27 deaths; Gueckedou, 190 cases and 140 deaths; Macenta, 44 cases and 24 deaths; Dabola, 4 cases and 4 deaths; Kissidougou, 7 cases and 5 deaths; Dinguiraye, 1 case and 1 death; Telimele, 22 cases and 5 deaths; and Boffa, 4 cases and 2 deaths.
