by Alexa Juran | Aug 24, 2023 | Blog, Blog Highlight
Sometimes a persistent outbreak can feel challenging, like solving a 10,000-piece puzzle. With the complexity of multiple variables coming into play, identifying the transmission routes to find the source becomes a daunting task. You pull out the heavy artillery and...
by Alexa Juran | Jun 29, 2023 | Blog
Industry standards warrant a 6-week period of continual surveillance of a hospital cluster outbreak at the point of last detection, but is that enough? How can we tell if 6 weeks are enough? How can we know if our outbreaks are related to each other or maybe even one...
by Alexa Juran | Apr 13, 2023 | Blog
Have you been having nightmares about your elderly neighbor becoming infected with Cordyceps and relentlessly chasing after you to spread the “conscious” fungus through a fresh bite? You may have if you have spent the last few months watching HBO’s “The Last of Us”...
by Alexa Juran | Feb 21, 2023 | Blog
Time for a change of pace. We usually talk about hospital acquired infections in our Lab Services Blog, but a recent blog article from Eric Topol asking why whole genome sequencing isn’t used for infectious disease diagnostics got us talking. Sequencing-based...
by admin | Sep 28, 2022 | Blog
We often get asked what other institutions are doing for their infection control and outbreak detection and how many are actually using whole-genome sequencing (WGS) routinely for outbreak transmission investigations. Well, the answer is…. complicated… Integrating WGS...
by admin | Jun 23, 2022 | Blog
Water is the essence of life—nothing can live without it, but what happens when water becomes the source of life-threatening infections? Environmental reservoirs have been linked to healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), with water being one of the key accomplices....
by admin | May 11, 2022 | Blog
When investigating HAI outbreaks, your decisions have significant consequences. Implementing disruptive precautionary measures without confirming clonality can be costly and unnecessary. But failing to deal with real outbreaks early can lead to patient safety concerns...
by admin | Mar 17, 2022 | Blog
If you’ve been in infection control for a while, you know what it feels like when you seem to have a persistent outbreak and just can’t seem to shake it off… But how do you know it’s actually an ongoing outbreak? Are the new cases you are seeing related to the prior...
by admin | Oct 14, 2021 | Blog
Recently, we received multiple requests to help with Nontuberculous Mycobacteria (NTM) healthcare-associated infection (HAI) investigations from hospitals located in different parts of the country, all within a short period of time. It’s not the first time we’ve been...
by admin | Jul 22, 2021 | Blog
When it comes to determining relatedness between isolates in an HAI investigation, you know by now that we believe there is no better tool than whole-genome sequencing (WGS). But in some cases, WGS alone may not be enough. Although WGS allows you to see variations of...
