Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) is one of the main pathogens causing nosocomial infections in the United States. Diarrhea, colitis, sepsis and lead to prolonged hospitalization and death. Mayo Clinic researchers say they have found a way to reduce acquisition of infection and reduce its frequency to a fraction of what it was.

The process requires constant daily cleaning of all surfaces of high contact with a chlorine disinfectant to kill the spores to clean in all patients in units with endemic rates of infection with C. difficult. The results were presented today at the Fifth International Conference on Health Ten-acquired infections in Atlanta, sponsored by the Society for Health Epidemiology of America, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and co- organized by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).

“The goal was to reduce nosocomial infection rates of C. difficult in two of our units, the highest incidence of 30 percent,” said lead researcher Robert Orenstein, DO “Our data show that we exceeded that. When the study concluded at the end of last year, one unit had gone 137 days without nosocomial infection with C. difficult. “The team had hoped to increase the time between hospital-acquired cases more than 20 days between infections.

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In an extensive review of six years of emergency department (ED) data, researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston in collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital, has found that many children with severe allergic reactions related to food need a second dose adrenaline, suggesting that patients should have two doses of EpiPen instead of one. Since 1997, the number of school-age children with food allergies has grown by 20 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study, published in the April issue of Pediatrics, is the largest to date to investigate the emergency treatment of food anaphylaxis in children, researchers said.

“Food allergies are an increasingly important issue in pediatrics,” said Susan Helms, MD, Division of Children of Allergy and Immunology and first author of the article. “There is not much data on the epidemiology of food allergies because it is a difficult thing to study.” Constraints imposed on the previous studies included clinical trials insensitive to food allergies – for example, using a skin test or a test blood – and the absence of a universally accepted definition of anaphylaxis.

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Like a wayward driver slammed the brakes, a special class of T cells may limit the effectiveness of therapeutic vaccines for HIV by slowing the immune system too soon, the report of the University of Pittsburgh researchers at Health Sciences latest issue of PLoS ONE. Their study, the first to examine the role of regulatory T cells in therapeutic vaccines against HIV, could help researchers improve the effectiveness of these vaccines in the development of methods to prevent the brake mechanism of these cells.

Regulatory T cells (Treg) are essential because they prevent the immune system turns against itself by suppressing the immune response. Without the braking action of Treg, autoimmune disease can thrive. But if these cells are closing the immune response of a therapeutic vaccine had the opportunity to boost immunity against HIV?

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