links for 2009-10-01

Healthcare-associated infections are a major public health problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were an estimated 1.7 million healthcare-associated infections and 99,000 deaths from those infections in 2002.1 A recent CDC report estimated the annual medical costs of healthcare-associated infections to U.S. hospitals to be between $28 and $45 billion, adjusted to 2007 dollars.2

Approximately 1 in 10 hospitalized patients will acquire an infection after admission, resulting in substantial economic cost (1) . The primary cost is that patients with hospital-acquired infections have their stay prolonged, during which time they occupy scarce bed-days and require additional diagnostic and therapeutic interventions (2). Estimates of the cost of these infections, in 2002 prices, suggest that the annual economic burden is $6.7 billion1 per year in the United States (3) and £1.06 billion (approximately $1.7 billion) in the United Kingdom (4).

A hospital-acquired infection, also called a nosocomial infection, is an infection that first appears between 48 hours and four days after a patient is admitted to a hospital or other health-care facility.

Hospital-acquired infections (HAIs), also known as health-care–associated infections, encompass almost all clinically evident infections that do not originate from a patient's original admitting diagnosis. Within hours after admission, a patient's flora begins to acquire characteristics of the surrounding bacterial pool. Most infections that become clinically evident after 48 hours of hospitalization are considered hospital-acquired. Infections that occur after the patient's discharge from the hospital can be considered to have a nosocomial origin if the organisms were acquired during the hospital stay.

Try not to be surprised that I disagree with Chris Abraham with regards to his suggestion on Metanomics that you go further with love-bombs than attacks on ignorant critics. I believe that you need a balance of love-bombers and goons/enforcers/counter-critics. Every social structure, offline or online, has them, and I think they express themselves in proportion to the nature of attack on what that social structure considers important… or if the attack is an existential threat. (Chris' comparison of Twitter to Second Life had its points, but was based on his ignorance of the wider SL experience… a lot of Coffee With Crayon Marketeers suffered from that.) Ultimately, the goons/enforcers will drive any rational and curious critic to the invitations of the volunteer guides/huggyfluffybunnies/cultists.

Chris Abraham @chrisabraham, well known social media business personality, wrote a blog post criticizing Second Life relative to Twitter. The dedicated SL crowd (including Dusan Writer, JenzZa Misfit, Beyers Sellers, et. al.) rallied round and brought Chris in for a grand tour. Today he has moderated his view and is a guest on Metanomics (http://www.metaomics.net). You can watch a recording of the show there in a day or two. On the far right is new SL resident Saroya Caffarelli, a new colleague of Chimera's who works at Wash U in Science Outreach.
Visit Chilbo (13, 210, 130)

AHA Media Group, LLC is a full service Web consulting firm based in the Washington, D.C. area.

Chris Abraham is very much into Twitter but he’s not one of those who claim microblogging means the end of long form blogging. Twitter, so he explained, is very good for fast responses, for instance when crises erupt around a brand. It’s an early warning system, a radar which can be used by companies to pick up signals about for instance complaining customers. This allows the company to defuse the tension by responding fast (so no more lazy weekends for the corporate world, they should at least have people monitoring the social media radars).