Dermatology News

Ted Eickhoff understood the intersection of public health and the infectious disease practitioner, effectively using his editorial pulpit at Infectious Disease News to promote dialogue and discourse on the rapidly changing circumstances that would dictate public health policy. He recognized the ever-evolving microbial world’s impact on not only the individual patient, but on the community at large, and remained at the forefront, ensuring that infectious disease practitioners received needed information in a timely manner so they could remain staunch public health partners. A profession is traditionally defined by its common body of knowledge. As with the 1910 Flexner Report that proved revolutionary for medical education in the United States, the 1915 Welch-Rose report presented to the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation outlined public health as a profession in which “Unity is to be found rather in the end to be accomplished. ... Public Health is not a single profession in the traditional sense and is best defined by its shared goals rather than its disparate means. Articulating who we are and what we do remains one of our greatest challenges.”

The FDA has approved an oral formulation of TPOXX for the treatment of smallpox, citing concerns that the infectious disease, long considered eradicated since 1980, could potentially be used as a bioweapon, according to a press release.

More than 60% of armadillos in an area of the Brazilian Amazon tested positive for leprosy bacteria, and 63% of residents in the area surveyed were found to have been exposed to the bacteria, according to findings published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

From 2000 to 2014, 140 outbreaks in 35 U.S. states and Guam were linked to untreated recreational water in lakes, rivers and oceans, according to a new MMWR report.

The Infectious Disease Society of America and the American Society for Microbiology released an updated guide designed to help health care providers use the microbiology laboratory to diagnose infectious diseases.

Researchers noted a “remarkable” decline in the incidence of skin and soft tissue infections, or SSTIs, in United States EDs between 2009 and 2014 following a sharp increase over the preceding years.

In July 1988, the first issue of Infectious Disease News was published (Figure 1, that’s right, I kept it all these years), with Dr. Ted Eickhoff as the Chief Medical Editor. Virtually all adult and pediatric infectious disease specialists received it at no cost. And although unsolicited publications (freebies) are often mostly a glorified collection of advertisements, IDN seemed different, with meaningful, well-written pieces, by very reputable experts, supplemented by high-quality pictures on glossy paper. It took the reputation of Dr. Eickhoff to recruit leading experts to contribute and his academic leadership to ensure overall quality.

Skin-to-skin contact between parents and newborns — also known as kangaroo care — has been shown in studies improve children’s health and development, but it can also expose NICU patients to Staphylococcus aureus colonization and infection. A three-part intervention that included skin cleansing reduced the incidence of these infections, according to research presented at the annual conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, or APIC.

ATLANTA — To help improve the care of troops injured in combat, the United States military has been exploring the complex microbiology of combat wounds.

People who inject drugs are around 16 times more likely to develop an invasive MRSA infection compared with others, with cases in this population rising from 4.1% to 9.2% from 2011 to 2016, according to findings published in MMWR.