Participatory approach to quality development in infection prevention and control (IPC) in Nigerian health facilities.

The development of an educational concept of a training programme for infection prevention and control (IPC) was seen as a key issue to successfully address the complexity of change processes of professional IPC routines in clinical procedures. Therefore, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Nigeria, and the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany established an interdisciplinary project framework, involving knowledge and competences from different disciplines and professions like health professionals, epidemiologists and educators (MAURICE project). A multi-module training programme for health care workers to improve IPC standards was developed and implemented based on the participatory approach and a systemic view for organizational change.

Persistent spatial patterns of interacting contagions.

The spread of infectious diseases, rumors, fashions, and innovations are complex contagion processes, embedded in network and spatial contexts. While the studies in the former context are intensively expanded, the latter remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the pattern formation of an interacting contagion, where two infections, A and B, interact with each other and diffuse simultaneously in space.

Phase transitions in cooperative coinfections: Simulation results for networks and lattices.

We study the spreading of two mutually cooperative diseases on different network topologies, and with two microscopic realizations, both of which are stochastic versions of a susceptible-infected-removed type model studied by us recently in mean field approximation. There it had been found that cooperativity can lead to first order transitions from spreading to extinction. However, due to the rapid mixing implied by the mean field assumption, first order transitions required nonzero initial densities of sick individuals.

High carriage rate of ESBL-producing Enterobacteriaceae at presentation and follow-up among travellers with gastrointestinal complaints returning from India and Southeast Asia.

Background: International travel contributes to the spread of multidrug-resistant microorganisms including extended spectrum beta-lactamase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (ESBL-PE). We assessed the proportion of faecal carriers of ESBL-PE among 211 patients with gastrointestinal symptoms who returned to Berlin, Germany, after international travel.

Methods: ESBL-PE were screened for on chromogenic agar, antimicrobial susceptibility testing was performed, and ESBL-genes were genotyped.

Academic training of medical students in transfusion medicine, hemotherapy, and hemostasis: results of a questionnaire-based status report in Germany.

Background: As a consequence of the German Transfusion Act and the corresponding Hemotherapeutic Guidelines of the German Medical Association, the National Advisory Committee Blood approved a recommendation (votum 29) in 2003 to specify students' training in transfusion medicine, hemotherapy, and hemostasis. The objective of this study was to assess the current status of teaching in these fields.

Methods: A questionnaire-based evaluation was performed at the medical schools in Germany (n = 34).

Secular trends in neonatal macrosomia in Berlin: influences of potential determinants.

To investigate the trend in the prevalence of neonatal macrosomia and to evaluate the influences of potential determinants, key features of 206 308 hospital deliveries (97% of all) in Berlin in the years 1993-99, collected by the Berlin Medical Board, were analysed using SPSS 10.0. After exclusion of multiple births and preterm infants, there was a significant increase over 7 years (P < 0.