Five medical centers receive CDC grant to help reduce healthcare-associated infections

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is awarding $10 million for new research to five academic medical centers as part of its Prevention Epicenter grant program, which supports efforts to develop and test innovative approaches to reducing infections in health care settings.

"Discoveries through the CDC Prevention Epicenter program have had great impact on decreasing healthcare-associated infections, or HAIs," said CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden, M.D., M.P.H.  "With prevention epicenters, we can expand our current knowledge and save even more lives as we work toward our goal of eliminating HAIs."

CDC estimates that 1 out of 20 hospitalized patients will acquire an infection while receiving health care treatment for other conditions. HAIs are infections developed during the course of medical care. With the emergence of drug-resistant infections and new pathogens in health care settings, new strategies to detect and reduce health care-associated infections become even more critical.  

"The Prevention Epicenter program discovers solutions and refines them so they can work to prevent infections for all healthcare settings," said John Jernigan M.D., M.S., director of CDC's Office of HAI Prevention Research and Evaluation. "During the past decade, some of our biggest breakthroughs in health care infection prevention have been rooted in research of the Prevention Epicenter program, and we look forward to future advances."

The innovative strategies that will be explored include:

• the use of combinations of bleach and ultraviolet light to clean hospital rooms to help prevent infection,
• new tests that help distinguish patients who need antibiotics from those who don't, as a means to prevent antibiotic- resistant infections,
• methods that can help doctors anticipate when medical devices being used to treat a patient are on the verge of causing an infection, so that device-associated infections can be averted before they begin, and
• treating patients with living microorganisms that are harmless to the patient but compete with harmful germs, as a means of preventing health care-associated infections.

Listed here are the institutions participating in the Prevention Epicenter Program, representing affiliated hospitals:

• Chicago Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Prevention Epicenter
  • Cook County Health & Hospital System
  • Rush University Medical Center
• Duke University Prevention Epicenter
  • Duke University, Durham, N.C.
• Translation Prevention Research Epicenter
  • Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Wellesley, Mass.
• Southeastern Pennsylvania Adult and Pediatric Prevention Epicenter Network
  • University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.
• Washington University and BJC Epi-Center for Prevention of Healthcare Associated Infections
  • Washington University, St. Louis, Mo.