Background Short-course antibiotic (SCA) therapy after appendectomy for complicated appendicitis (CA) has gained increasing attention, but its safety and efficacy remain insufficiently supported by me...

This JAMA Patient Page describes antimicrobial resistance, its risk factors, and how to decrease the spread of antibiotic resistance.

CMV is a common virus that infects people of all ages and is the most common infectious cause of birth defects in the US.

In The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Enrico Ricchizzi and colleagues report the results of a year-long study of the incidence of health-care-associated infections (HAIs) in long-term care facilities (LT...

Surprise discovery could pave the way for new treatments against drug-resistant infections.

Quantitative estimates of the independent effect of the acquisition of ARGs on MIC add to the interpretability and utility of existing databases. Compared with approaches using machine learning models...

Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) is a group of E. coli strains that produce enterotoxins, causing diarrheal disease in animals and humans, particularly in young animals and children (1). ETEC i...

Immune women with intrauterine human CMV transmission have distinct immunological parameters (different from immune women without CMV transmission, but similar to women with primary infection) and mig...

In their recent article in The Lancet Microbe, Elissa Khamisse and colleagues propose that the impact of antimicrobial use in animal husbandry on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in humans is exaggerate...

AbstractBackground and objectives. Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales (CRE) that do not produce carbapenemases (non-CPE) are increasingly reported world

Background Following identification of widespread Mycobacterium chimaera infections in 2013 associated with aerosolization from Sorin heater-cooler-devices (HCD), microbiological monitoring of HCDs ha...

Background To quantify the incidence of peripheral intravenous catheter (PIVC) infections and to describe the influence of clinical characteristics, including dwell time, on risk. Methods Meta-synthes...

npj Antimicrobials and Resistance - The impact of bacterial purine metabolism on antibiotic efficacy

Klebsiella pneumoniae Przondovirus KP32 presents a complex capsular degradation machinery comprised of two serotype-specific depolymerases, KP32gp38 a…

AbstractBackground. The prevalence of antibiotic resistance continues to rise, rendering many valuable antimicrobial drugs ineffective. Pairwise cyclic ant

Aim Central venous catheters (CVCs) are essential for long-term therapies but carry a high risk of central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs), which significantly impact patient outcomes and healthcare costs. This study aimed to develop a causal model for CLABSI using expert knowledge to guide future clinical trials and prevention strategies. Methods We constructed a directed acyclic graph (DAG) informed by literature and expert knowledge elicitation. A multidisciplinary team of clinicians, including infectious disease and vascular access experts, participated in interviews and workshops to refine the DAG, resulting in a final model with 30 variables representing CLABSI development. Findings The expert-elicited DAG identified two main pathways, patient-related and CVC-related, each contributing to CLABSI risk. Variables and relationships in the DAG highlighted key patient characteristics, CVC management practices, and overlapping factors influencing infection. This model serves as a novel framework to understand CLABSI causation and supports trial design by identifying confounding factors, causal pathways, and meaningful endpoints. Conclusions/implications Our causal DAG provides a structured representation of CLABSI risk factors, which may support the design of clinical trials examining interventions to reduce CVC-related infections. By clarifying causal mechanisms, the DAG can enhance the specificity of endpoints and improve the rigor of prevention strategies.

Many antibiotics are less effective at killing pathogens under oxygen (O2)-limited conditions. Pathogens frequently encounter O2 limitation within host environments, which helps explain why antibiotic therapies often fail to resolve chronic infections. We are investigating the relationship between O2 availability and drug efficacy in the opportunistic pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa. In agreement with prior work, we demonstrate that P. aeruginosa exhibits antibiotic recalcitrance under hypoxic conditions. We also explore the use of a novel therapeutic, chlorate, which kills P. aeruginosa under O2-limited conditions when the pathogen utilizes anaerobic metabolism (nitrate respiration). Excitingly, we find that chlorate-antibiotic combinations are highly lethal to P. aeruginosa across a wide range of O2 availabilities similar to those the pathogen encounters during infection. Our work demonstrates that we can leverage our understanding of pathogen physiology to propose novel drug combinations that hijack anaerobic metabolism to overcome antibiotic treatment failure in O2-limited environments.

This cohort study examines the patterns of broad-spectrum antibiotic use across defined end-of-life intervals in patients with advanced cancer.

Staphylococcus lugdunensis (SL) can cause infective endocarditis (IE), with unusually high complication and mortality rates. According to the 2023 Duke-ISCVID criteria, blood cultures positive for ...

Childhood mortality remains a major public health challenge in low-income and middle-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, despite major advances in universal sanitation and immunisati...

This cohort study examines whether nontuberculous mycobacterial disease is associated with increased mortality risk among solid-organ transplant recipients.

Background Early-onset neonatal sepsis (EOS) is a critical condition primarily caused by maternal–fetal transmission of bacterial pathogens during delivery, with Escherichia coli and Group B Streptoco...

npj Biomedical Innovations - Self-assembled DNA nanocarrier-enabled drug delivery for bone remodeling and antimicrobial applications

This cohort study assesses the association of postoperative antibiotic prophylaxis with surgical site infections and other postoperative outcomes in children undergoing minimally invasive pectus excav...