For example, the University of Virginia Health System saw an increase in CRE transmission in 2010, Kyle Enfield, MD, the medical director of the system’s ICU, wrote in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention blog post.
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Dr. Enfield and others first attempted to limit the facility’s exposure to CRE and another nosocomial pathogen, extensively drug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, but those attempts, based on standard infection control practices, failed, Dr. Enfield wrote.
So, the organization used a bundled set of interventions to assess the prevalence of CRE and XDR-AB colonization in the ICU. The bundled approach brought the CRE incidence down to 0.1 percent of patient days and eliminated drug-resistant A. baumannii completely.
Those measures are now recommended practice in the CDC’s 2012 Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae Toolkit.
The experience was documented in a study recently published in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, which concluded that the health system’s experience shows the effectiveness of the CDC toolkit.
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