Clostridium difficile: emerging public health threat and other nosocomial or hospital acquired infections. Foreword.

摘要

Reports questioning the safety of hospitals began to appear in the 1990s. The Institute of Medicine reported, in 1999, that deaths attributable to medical errors in the form of incompatible transfusions, wrong site surgeries, medication errors, etc exceeded the number of deaths from breast cancer, motor vehicle accidents, and AIDS combined.While new protocols and regulations have made hospitals safer, we are now faced with a different form of safety threat and find ourselves in the midst of an epidemic of hospital-acquired infections, among them methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, vancomycin-resis-tant enterococci, and several gram-negative bacteria, including those producing extended spectrum beta-lactamases, and Clostridium difficile. Today, these infections challenge our ability to heal patients who are older, have more comorbidities than ever before, and may be on medications that compromise immune function.