$10 Million Award may Help Reduce Infections

Several university medical centers have been selected to receive funding to help them develop innovative methods which will ultimately reduce infections resulting from health care treatments. The $10 million in funding awarded to the centers comes from the CDC’s Prevention Epicenter grant program.
“The Prevention Epicenter program discovers solutions and refines them so they can work to prevent infections for all healthcare settings,” said John Jernigan M.D., M.S., director of CDC’s Office of HAI Prevention Research and Evaluation. “During the past decade, some of our biggest breakthroughs in health care infection prevention have been rooted in research of the Prevention Epicenter program, and we look forward to future advances.”
According to CDC estimates, 1 in 20 patients hospitalized for a medical treatment procedure will acquire an infection during their stay. Reducing this statistic is becoming more important with each passing year due to the emergence of more and more drug-resistant infections, bacteria and viruses.
“Discoveries through the CDC Prevention Epicenter program have had great impact on decreasing healthcare-associated infections, or HAIs” said CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. “With prevention epicenters, we can expand our current knowledge and save even more lives as we work toward our goal of eliminating HAIs.”