A detailed national survey of Americans, which included residents of the four largest US metropolitan areas, found that about half of those unwilling to be vaccinated against COVID-19 were unlikely to change their minds. A research team based at Emerson University published their findings yesterday in Scientific Reports.
Our weekly wrap-up of antimicrobial stewardship & antimicrobial resistance scans
Over half of adults diagnosed as having a rheumatologic disease reported persistent COVID-19 symptoms at least a month after recovery from their infection, according to survey results presented late last week at the virtual American College of Rheumatology annual meeting.
New data released today by the United Kingdom's Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD) show that the use of antibiotics in UK livestock continues to fall.
A coronavirus sharing 92.6% of nucleotide identity with SARS-CoV-2 was detected in bats in Cambodia in 2010, according to a new study in Nature Communications, adding to the understanding of natural reservoirs for the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic.
Testing conducted on hedgehogs in Helsinki, Finland, revealed the presence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens and genes known to cause human infections, according to a paper to be presented at the upcoming European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID).
Patients hospitalized during the COVID-19 pandemic and tested for SARS-CoV-2 had higher rates of antibiotic-resistant infections compared with those hospitalized before the pandemic, according to a study presented yesterday at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2022).
A modeling study estimates that COVID-19 vaccination prevented more than 1.5 million infections, 72,000 hospitalizations, and 19,000 deaths in the first 10 months of vaccination in California, according to a study published late last week in JAMA Network Open.
Israelis aged 60 and older given a fourth dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine amid the Omicron surge had a 64% lower risk of hospitalization and 78% lower risk of death than those who received three doses, suggests an observational study published yesterday in Nature Medicine.
Following the reappearance of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC's) Equateur province, the country today launched an rVSV-EBOV vaccine campaign, tapping an initial shipment of 200 doses, the World Health Organization (WHO) African regional office said today.
Using excess mortality data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), researchers from Georgetown University found significant regional differences in mortality rates due to COVID-19, with a disproportionate number of virus deaths in Southern states.
The sensitivity of home rapid antigen COVID-19 tests peaks 4 days after symptom onset, suggesting that a negative antigen test should be followed by a second test in 1 or 2 days, according to a prospective study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The National Institutes of Health this week announced a $2.4 million grant for a clinical trial to study responsible use of antibiotics in the treatment of severe gum disease.
A multimodal intervention at primary care practices in a large healthcare system in North Carolina was associated with significant decreases in inappropriate outpatient antibiotic prescribing for upper respiratory tract infections, researchers reported today in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology.
The rate of full COVID-19 vaccination among employees of a private Minnesota medical device manufacturer rose 10.4 percentage points after the company began offering $1,000 incentives for immunization, finds a study published late last week in JAMA Network Open.
Cognitive impairment from severe COVID-19 is equivalent to losing 10 IQ points or 20 years of aging, and any recovery is slow at best, suggests a small study published late last week in eClinicalMedicine.
A study conducted in a hospital with high rates of antibiotic resistance in Singapore found that sequential implementation of two antimicrobial stewardship interventions was associated with reduced use of broad-spectrum antibiotics, researchers reported yesterday in JAMA Network Open.
Nearly 13% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients had serious neurologic illnesses in the first year of the pandemic, suggests an international study published last week in Critical Care Explorations.
A study of more than 160,000 COVID-19 tests of South African healthcare workers concludes that two doses of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines are about 71% effective against hospitalization caused by Omicron 1 to 2 months after the second dose, with little waning at 5 months or longer.
The World Health Organization (WHO) today issued a report highlighting the threat of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and the role that infection prevention and control (IPC) programs can play in reducing that threat.
Over 40% of 79 stool samples from COVID-19 patients admitted to one of four hospitals in Spain contained SARS-CoV-2 RNA but no live virus, suggesting a negligible ability to replicate in this medium and a very low likelihood of fecal-oral viral transmission, finds a study published yesterday in Scientific Reports.
A coalition of 70 organizations in Australia is joining forces to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the food and agribusiness industries.
In a study published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases, researchers showed canine olfaction—or dog sniffing—was both highly sensitive and specific when it came to identifying patients with COVID-19, even those who were asymptomatic or presymptomatic.
An observational study using a multinational database of 447 maternal COVID-19 deaths in Latin America reveals that over 90% were attributed to acute respiratory failure after severe infection and that 35% of the women who died were never admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU), possibly due to lack of capacity.
