The high cost of antimicrobials presents critical challenges for healthcare providers managing infections amidst the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). High costs hinder access to necessary treatments, disproportionately affecting disadvantaged populations and exacerbating health disparities. High drug prices necessitate the use of less effective or more toxic alternatives, leading to suboptimal outcomes and prolonged hospitalizations. This, in turn, increases healthcare costs and undermines efforts to combat AMR. Equitable policies, national formularies, and cost caps for essential antimicrobials can ensure universal access to life-saving treatments and enable antimicrobial stewardship programs to ensure the best possible outcomes.

Chinese morphological awareness is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct but there is a lack of understanding of how its dimensions are related. Latent change score modeling was used to examine the bivariate relationships of two facets of oral morphological awareness, namely morpheme and structure awareness in Chinese children in grades one through three. Two hundred and three children in China completed morpheme (homonym awareness) and structure awareness (lexical compounding) tasks across the three grades (M = 6.66, SD = .30 at the first time point). Results indicated that growth in structure awareness was predicted in part by previous levels of morpheme awareness, suggesting that morpheme awareness leads the growth of structure awareness. Educational implications are discussed.

SHEA endorses adhering to the recommendations by the CDC and ACIP for immunizations of all children and adults. All persons providing clinical care should be familiar with these recommendations and should routinely assess immunization compliance of their patients and strongly recommend all routine immunizations to patients. All healthcare personnel (HCP) should be immunized against vaccine-preventable diseases as recommended by the CDC/ACIP (unless immunity is demonstrated by another recommended method). SHEA endorses the policy that immunization should be a condition of employment or functioning (students, contract workers, volunteers, etc) at a healthcare facility. Only recognized medical contraindications should be accepted for not receiving recommended immunizations.

Benchmarks for antimicrobial consumption measured in antimicrobial days are beginning to emerge. The relationship between the traditional measure of days of therapy and antimicrobial days is unclear. We observed a high intermethod correlation (R2=0.99): antimicrobial days were 1.9-fold lower than days of therapy across agents. Individual institutions should correlate these measures.

Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2016;37:971–973