The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced plans Monday to spend $110 million, $13 million more than 2014, to help states track and respond to infectious diseases. This year's funding, which is allocated through the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity for Infectious Diseases Cooperative Agreement (ELC), includes $17.4 million to prevent and track foodborne illnesses, $4 million more than what was spent in 2014. The funds will be used to support the CDC's PulseNet surveillance system, which connects foodborne illness cases to DNA "fingerprinting" of bacteria, and help the Integrated Food Safety Centers of Excellence establish a new Northeast Regional center to respond to outbreaks.
More than 80 percent of neonatal intensive-care units, or NICUs, use temporary first names for patients — Babygirl Jackson or Babyboy Goldsmith, for example — a convention that may lead to errors in prescribing medicines. A new study has found that a simple change in this procedure can significantly reduce such errors. The NICUs at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx instituted a new system two years ago. They started naming babies using the mother's first name — Jennifersgirl Jackson and Karensboy Goldsmith. Researchers compared the number of wrong-patient electronic orders of medicines in the year before the change with the number in the year after.
Nancy Hutton, an associate professor at the medical school of Johns Hopkins University, has one of the hardest jobs in medicine: She specializes in pediatric hospice and palliative care. She sees the sickest children—the ones with severe neurological problems that cause profound developmental delays, or with cancers slowly ravaging their bodies, or severe organ failures. The worst, though, is when she doesn't know exactly what's wrong with a child. "That's even harder," she said. "When you can't give something a name." Sometimes her job is to keep her patients comfortable: helping them keep food down without vomiting or easing their physical pain.
One day last year, Enid Shapiro sat in her room at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center as the patient in the next bed underwent an unpleasant procedure, cries of distress and confusion ringing out as she was poked and prodded. Shapiro, across the room, tried not to look. Staff flitted around Shapiro to throw away needles, oblivious to her discomfort. "Nobody asked me," Shapiro said. "Nobody asked me if I'd like to leave the room." Since she was diagnosed with breast cancer, the hospital has saved Shapiro's life time and time again. But that sting of indifference at the hands of the hospital felt like a personal affront.
A new federal crackdown that takes money away from hospitals with high infection rates is prompting reforms in its first year in some Cleveland locations, such as Cleveland Clinic Hospital and St. Vincent Charity Medical Center. For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has worked to reduce infection rates by educating hospitals on best practices and making public the number of infections that are contracted by patients while at each facility. Still, "one in every 25 people who goes into the hospital to get well will end up getting an infection they didn't have when they walked in the door of the hospital," said Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, associate director for health care associated infection programs at the CDC .
When Donna Yip, a lawyer who lives in the financial district, went into labor with her second child in June, she had more than just her husband and medical team in her room at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital. Jackson Simmonds from the Julien Farel Restore Salon & Spa was also there, with a curling iron, hair dryer and boar bristle hairbrushes in his Longchamp tote. They were his tools to style Ms. Yip's hair immediately after delivery. Ms. Yip is one of a growing number of women who are booking hairstylists and makeup artists to come to their hospital room for postpartum grooming, typically with the first photographs of mother and child in mind.