CDC's Get Smart for Healthcare program

Arjun Srinivasan, Medical Director for CDC’s “Get Smart for Healthcare” campaign, and Ramanan Laxminarayan, Director of Extending the Cure, co-authored a recent piece in the Health Care Blog. It describes the current crisis with carbepenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae and how the CDC and partners are responding. For example, this week, they launched the “Get Smart for Healthcare” program which complements the existing “Get Smart: Know When Antibiotics Work” program. I will let you read what Arjun and Ramaman have to say...

link: The Health Care Blog

h/t: Mark Vander Weg

Post #610: Happy "Get Smart About Antibiotics Week" (November 15-21, 2010)

Man, have we done a lot of posting in the past 1.5 years.  I think Dan and Mike will agree with me here when I say that none of our posts have been as important as this one.  None.  The reason for this is that I'm announcing a whole 7 days of celebrating and not just one day. The world has witnessed Global Handwashing Day,  World Hand Hygiene Day, and World MRSA Day this past year.

But notice, these were just on single days.  Thus, we can officially announce that the smart use of antibiotics is 7 times more important than MRSA and 7/2 or 3.5 times more important than the domain of handwashing/hand hygiene. These are two questions that as an epidemiologist I've been struggling to answer for 10+ years and now I finally know.  While it is true that this is the 3rd annual "Get Smart About Antibiotics Week" and I should have officially known this two years ago, I do like to wait for "replication of results" or reproducibility before drawing a firm conclusion on such important questions. Alright everybody, get ready and Get Smart about antibiotics!