Since the initial publication of A Compendium of Strategies to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections in Acute Care Hospitals in 2008, the prevention of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) has continued to be a national priority. Progress in healthcare epidemiology, infection prevention, antimicrobial stewardship, and implementation science research has led to improvements in our understanding of effective strategies for HAI prevention. Despite these advances, HAIs continue to affect ∼1 of every 31 hospitalized patients,1 leading to substantial morbidity, mortality, and excess healthcare expenditures,1 and persistent gaps remain between what is recommended and what is practiced.

The widespread impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on HAI outcomes2 in acute-care hospitals has further highlighted the essential role of infection prevention programs and the critical importance of prioritizing efforts that can be sustained even in the face of resource requirements from COVID-19 and future infectious diseases crises.3

The Compendium: 2022 Updates document provides acute-care hospitals with up-to-date, practical expert guidance to assist in prioritizing and implementing HAI prevention efforts. It is the product of a highly collaborative effort led by the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA), the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), the American Hospital Association (AHA), and The Joint Commission, with major contributions from representatives of organizations and societies with content expertise, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Pediatric Infectious Disease Society (PIDS), the Society for Critical Care Medicine (SCCM), the Society for Hospital Medicine (SHM), the Surgical Infection Society (SIS), and others.

Disturbances are critical for maintaining environmental heterogeneity and biodiversity across landscapes. Hurricanes represent a common disturbance in the Caribbean Sea. These storms are predicted to become more frequent and severe as climate shifts. Understanding how island communities respond to disturbances is critical to their conservation. We surveyed Virgin Islands National Park located on the island of St. John in the Caribbean Sea in 2016 and 2018 to evaluate prolonged herpetofauna community response and resistance to hurricanes. These surveys occurred in March 2016, and June 2018, before and after the 2017 hurricane season, when hurricanes Irma and Maria struck St. John. Using visual encounter surveys, vocalisation surveys, and opportunistic encounters, we surveyed trails within the park through five landscape cover types pre- and post-hurricane. We used linear regression to determine differences in diversity and species richness among landscape cover types and between pre- and post-hurricane surveys and non-metric multidimensional scaling to observe associations among species and landscape cover types pre- and post-hurricane surveys. We determined that there were no significant changes in landscape cover and herpetofauna community associations before and after the 2017 hurricane season, indicating that the herpetofauna communities of Virgin Islands National Park are well adapted to hurricane-related disturbance.

Understanding place-based contributors to health requires geographically and culturally diverse study populations, but sharing location data is a significant challenge to multisite studies. Here, we describe a standardized and reproducible method to perform geospatial analyses for multisite studies. Using census tract-level information, we created software for geocoding and geospatial data linkage that was distributed to a consortium of birth cohorts located throughout the USA. Individual sites performed geospatial linkages and returned tract-level information for 8810 children to a central site for analyses. Our generalizable approach demonstrates the feasibility of geospatial analyses across study sites to promote collaborative translational research.

Many formerly glaciated valleys in the western United States preserve detailed glacial features that span the penultimate glaciation through the last deglaciation; however, numerical age control is limited in many of these systems. We report 35 new cosmogenic 10Be surface exposure ages of moraine boulders in the Sawatch Range, Colorado. Eight ages suggest Bull Lake moraines in Lake Creek (range: 132–120 ka, n = 4) and Clear Creek (range: 187–133 ka, n = 4) valleys may correlate with Marine Isotope Stage 6. In Lake Creek valley, 22 10Be ages from Pinedale end moraines average 20.6 ± 0.6 ka, and 5 10Be ages from a recessional moraine average 15.6 ± 0.7 ka, indicating that glaciers occupied two extended positions at ~21–20 and ~16 ka. The glacial extent dated to ~16 ka was nearly as great as that of the earlier glacial phase, suggesting that climate conditions in the Colorado Rocky Mountains at this time were similar to those of the last glacial maximum. Combining these moraine ages with seven previously published 10Be ages from cirque and valley-bottom bedrock reveals that the Lake Creek paleoglacier lost 82% of its full glacial length in ~1.5 ka and was completely deglaciated by ~14 ka.

This was a metabolic study of bulimia nervosa required to design short-term cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) beginning with a brief admission to a psychiatric ward. The treatment produced significant improvements in eating behaviour and results are compared with those of previously published studies. The comparisons do not suggest that brief admission at the onset of therapy might enhance its effectiveness. In other respects, increase in normal meal intake was found to correlate significantly with decrease in hinging. This supports the notion that appropriate food intake at meal times should be an important issue in CBT for bulimia nervosa.

Buried surface hoar and near-surface faceted crystals are known to lead to deadly avalanches. Over the course of three winter seasons a field investigation detailing the environmental conditions leading to the formation of these crystals was performed. Weather stations on north- and south-facing aspects were established. The weather data were accompanied by detailed daily observations and grain-scale photographs of the snow surface. During the three seasons, 35 surface hoar and 47 near-surface facets events were recorded. The mean weather conditions for the entire dataset (all three seasons and both stations) were compared to the nights when surface hoar formed. The comparison yielded five parameters that were statistically linked to the formation of surface hoar: incoming longwave radiation, snow surface temperature, wind velocity, relative humidity and the air/snow temperature difference. A similar comparison between the daytime mean values for all days with near-surface facet events revealed three parameters with statistically significant differences. Thus, these parameters (short- and longwave radiation and relative humidity) could be statistically linked to facet formation. This research also suggests that environmental conditions in the daytime hours before and after surface hoar formation are statistically similar to the conditions causing near-surface facet formation.

Understanding competition for soil nitrate between common shrub-steppe, potential reclamation species, and common invasive species is necessary to identify mechanisms associated with ecosystem invasion and can assist with developing weed management scenarios. We designed a field experiment to evaluate the differential competitive effects of the invasive annual grass downy brome, the invasive biennial forb dyer's woad, and the reclamation shrub prostrate kochia, on nitrate acquisition of the perennial grass crested wheatgrass, the native forb western yarrow, and the native shrub big sagebrush. Individual plants were grown in two-plant neighborhoods, and a K15NO3 tracer was injected into the soil between plants and recovered from leaf material after 5 to 11 d. We also evaluated neighbor effects on shoot and root growth, leaf carbon : nitrogen ratio, and leaf nitrogen concentrations to better understand how these traits are associated with differences in nitrate acquisition and nitrogen allocation among the three growth forms. Nitrate acquisitions by crested wheatgrass and western yarrow were significantly lower when competing with downy brome than with dyer's woad and prostrate kochia; however, competitors had similar, negative effects on nitrate acquisition by big sagebrush. Nitrate acquisition ratios between competing neighbors revealed that: (1) the grasses always acquired more nitrate than neighbors of a different growth form, (2) western yarrow was equally competitive with dyer's woad and prostrate kochia, and (3) all neighbors acquired more nitrate than big sagebrush. More successful competition for nitrate in the grasses was associated with greater specific root length. Compared to species of the same respective growth form, the two invasive weeds (downy brome and dyer's woad) and prostrate kochia always had significantly lower leaf carbon : nitrogen ratio, and greater leaf nitrogen concentration, which have been broadly correlated with leaf lifespan and nutrient use efficiency, and indicate differing strategies to persist in the semiarid shrub-steppe ecosystems.

In North America, terrestrial records of biodiversity and climate change that span Marine Oxygen Isotope Stage (MIS) 5 are rare. Where found, they provide insight into how the coupling of the ocean–atmosphere system is manifested in biotic and environmental records and how the biosphere responds to climate change. In 2010–2011, construction at Ziegler Reservoir near Snowmass Village, Colorado (USA) revealed a nearly continuous, lacustrine/wetland sedimentary sequence that preserved evidence of past plant communities between ~140 and 55 ka, including all of MIS 5. At an elevation of 2705 m, the Ziegler Reservoir fossil site also contained thousands of well-preserved bones of late Pleistocene megafauna, including mastodons, mammoths, ground sloths, horses, camels, deer, bison, black bear, coyotes, and bighorn sheep. In addition, the site contained more than 26,000 bones from at least 30 species of small animals including salamanders, otters, muskrats, minks, rabbits, beavers, frogs, lizards, snakes, fish, and birds. The combination of macro- and micro-vertebrates, invertebrates, terrestrial and aquatic plant macrofossils, a detailed pollen record, and a robust, directly dated stratigraphic framework shows that high-elevation ecosystems in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado are climatically sensitive and varied dramatically throughout MIS 5.