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In response to Pushpendra jain's comments... I am no longer amazed of anything in pediatrics. In 15 years of primary care suburban practice I have learned the following: I am an antibiotic nazi especially if i do not treat by telephone request, my medical expertise is compromised by my financial gains or relationships with pharmaceutical companies, my patients' parents do more "research" than I do--AKA reading a google searched internet account, I should be available at their whim and see them at a time convenient to their kid's soccer schedule as a walk-in service, and parents that think nothing of texting while driving their kids to said soccer game think that a 1 in 10,000-100,000 risk of a vaccination obviates its well documented scientific benefits. We are in a cycle where people no longer believe in science, but they'll be back when we see resurgences of diseases i haven't seen since medical school.

Dr. Segedy, I can assure you that your sentiments were shared by a majority of the attendees at the AAP conference. It seems as though we have gotten to a point where the element of surprise no longer exists; health care providers (for the most part) are numb to the fact that studies with ulterior motives (ie, Wakefield & vaccines/autism) and "celebrities" seem to have more of an impact on health care decisions than physicians who have dedicated their entire lives studying medicine. And when it comes to self diagnosing via Dr. Google, Offit specifically mentioned that a website like the "National Vaccine Information Center" (NCVIC.org) comes up on the first page of Google for a search for "vaccines" and yet the information on the website is extremely misleading and, in some cases, downright wrong. But that doesn't stop people from treating it as credible; after all, it's on the Internet so it must be true!

“We have a very serious problem, and we need to sound an alarm.”

Healthcare institutions in 42 states have now identified at least one case of CRE. The occurrence of this resistance in the overall family of bacteria has risen at least four-fold over 10 years. In the CDC’s surveillance networks, 4.6 percent of hospitals and 17.8 percent of long-term care facilities diagnosed this bug in the first half of 2012.

CRE stands for “carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae.” Enterobacteriaceae are a family of more than 70 bacteria which share the characteristic of being gut-dwelling (“entero”)

18 people harbored the dangerous germ, and six died of bloodstream infections from it. Another five made it through the outbreak only to die from the diseases that brought them to NIH's world-famous campus in the first place.

Infections at health care facilities are one of the nation's leading causes of preventable death, claiming an estimated 99,000 lives a year.

KPC has emerged over the past decade to become a fast-growing threat in intensive care units, spreading easily between very ill people and killing half of those it sickens.

“All the collaborative mechanisms and things that make a team a team, rather than four individuals working separately, were damaged by the exposure to rudeness.”

After such a comment, the teams performed significantly worse in the simulated patient emergencies. Their diagnostic skills deteriorated, and so did their technical procedural abilities, from ventilating and resuscitating the artificial babies properly to ordering and giving the right medications. Both doctors and nurses tended to perform worse individually. They also worked less effectively as teams, as far as communicating and helping one another take care of the sick “patient.”

pre-operative antiseptics have never been examined for infection risk. They were grandfathered into FDA approval because they were on the market long before the FDA began assessing such products, as a result of expert testimony that they would kill any microbes that contaminated them.  That assumption turns out to have been incorrect.

And it calls for action in four areas: gathering better data; preventing infections, through vaccination, better protective behavior in hospitals, and better food handling; improving the way in which antibiotics are used, by not using them inappropriately in health care or agriculture; and developing not just new categories of antibiotics but better diagnostic tests so that resistant organisms can be identified and dealt with sooner, before they spread.

“My biggest frustration is the pace of change,” he told me. “Hospitals are making progress, but it’s single digits in terms of the number of hospitals that are being very proactive.