Victor Rosenthal

As an internal medicine and infectious disease clinician in the early 1990s, I saw the clinical impact of high rates of nosocomial infections caused by resistant organisms, and changed my focus to infection prevention. I developed a hospital-acquired infection (HAI) surveillance program and was able to successfully reduce HAIs and bacterial resistance in my country. I decided to share this methodology with the people in other countries and created an organization called International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortium (INICC). The INICC provides software, tools and recommendations to promote evidence-based infection control in hospitals. The INICC work is focused in limited-resource countries and in hospitals of developed countries without sufficient experience in HAI surveillance and control. The INICC program is now in more than 50 countries from five continents. This program can measure and help reduce HAIs and also impact mortality, length of stay, cost and bacterial resistance rates. Because all of us need to be resistance fighters.