As students return to the classroom with brand-new backpacks and high hopes for a good academic year, an invisible army of microbes is preparing an attack on the little learners. Legions of cold and flu viruses are determined to circulate through the “student body” in a show of force that will make school PTA newsletter
The public bathroom scene is changing. Increasingly, manual faucets and soap dispensers are being replaced by hands-free electronic eye faucets that conserve water and need only sense a pair of hands to start running water of a perfect temperature. This is a positive development because those who wash their hands don’t have to touch the
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced last month that it has updated and improved its 11-year old estimates of the prevalence of foodborne illness in the United States. According to the new statistics, each year 48 million people, or one in six Americans, contract foodborne illnesses; 128,000 Americans are hospitalized and 3,000
Research by England’s Health Protection Agency (HPA) has revealed that over half the cleaning cloths sampled in restaurant kitchens were found to contain unsatisfactory levels of bacteria, which are a sign of poor hygiene and potential cross contamination. The study was carried out by the HPA’s Food, Water and Environmental Microbiology laboratories and was done
Over the past several years, norovirus outbreaks have been increasingly reported at health care facilities across the county. Several states have implemented guidelines to help health care institutions and communities prevent norovirus transmission. Noroviruses cause gastroenteritis, an inflammation of the stomach and the small and large intestines, in people of all ages. Noroviruses are most dangerous
According to a new study, sepsis and pneumonia, two common illnesses caused by hospital-acquired infections, killed 48,000 Americans in 2006, and cost the nation over 8 billion dollars to treat. The study, co-authored by Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan and Dr. Anup Malani, is titled,Clinical and Economic Outcomes Attributable to Health Care – Associated Sepsis and Pneumonia, and