Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

10 INFECTION CONTROL Pennsylvania to suspend childhood vaccine requirement By Mackenzie Bean T he Pennsylvania Department of Health is suspending its childhood immunization requirement this fall, spurring concerns from some pediatricians, reported e Philadelphia Inquirer. Pennsylvania law requires school-age children to be vaccinated against a set list of childhood diseases, such as mumps and whooping cough, unless they have a medical exemption. In late July, the state shared plans to sus- pend these requirements for a two-month period at the start of the school year since the pandemic has complicated some par- ents' efforts to get their kids vaccinated. "It's going to take time to catch every- one up, and we don't want to hold back children because they're not up to date within five days [after starting school]," Amber Tirmal, manager of the Philadel- phia Department of Health's immunization program told the Inquirer. Some pediatricians have expressed concerns about the suspension, arguing it could cause further vaccination delays or a resurgence in vaccine-preventable diseases. Physicians also said they have appointments available to safely vaccinate children. "I was surprised to see [the suspension]. We have immunizations to prevent certain infectious diseases, but I fear they will come back again," Trude Haecker, MD, a pediatrician and president of the Pennsyl- vania Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the publication. "We're able to ramp up and see patients again. We have a need to catch children up, especially at a time when practices are opening up and people are starting to trust their pedi- atricians again." n Trained dogs may be able to detect COVID-19, study suggests By Anuja Vaidya T rained dogs are able to distinguish between samples taken from COVID-19 patients and control samples, meaning they may be able to identify those infected with the new coronavirus, a preliminary study found. For the study, German researchers trained eight detection dogs to detect saliva or tracheobronchial secretions of patients infected with the new coronavirus. The training took one week. They found that the dogs were able to correctly identify 94 percent of the 1,012 samples taken from COVID-19 patients. The samples were distributed at random and neither the dog handlers nor the research- ers on site knew which samples were positive for COVID-19 and which were not. "The results of the study are incredibly exciting," Holger Volk, PhD, director of the University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover Small Animal Clinic. "We have laid a solid foundation for future studies to investigate what the dogs smell and whether they can also be used to differentiate between different times of illness or clinical phenotypes." Researchers led by the University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover, in collaboration with the German Armed Forces, the Hanover Medical School and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, pub- lished the study findings in the journal BMC Infectious Diseases. Other organizations are also researching whether dogs can detect COVID-19 infections, including Philadelphia-based University of Penn- sylvania and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom. n Hospitals with more private rooms have lower rates of MRSA, study shows By Anuja Vaidya P atients are far less likely to be infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococ- cus aureus when hospitalized in facili- ties with more private patient rooms, a study published in PLOS One found. The study examined data on patients discharged from hospitals and hospital-ac- quired MRSA events occurring between Sept. 1, 2015, and Aug. 31, 2016. Researchers analyzed data for 340 hospitals across the country and 2.67 million patient discharges. MRSA incidence within these hospitals was 386 per 100,000 inpatient discharges, and, on average, 62.73 percent of the rooms in these hospitals were private patient rooms. Researchers found that rates of MRSA infection were more than eight times higher at hospitals with the lowest percentage of private rooms (62 percent or less) compared to hospitals with the largest percentage of private rooms (82 percent or more). n

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