Infections in Long-Term Care Facilities

Excerpt

To the editor: We have just completed our report on infection surveillance in a skilled nursing facility (1) and were struck by the absence of such a focus in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease's recent symposium, "The Impact of Infection on Medical Care in the United States: Problems and Priorities for Future Research" (2).

The symposium addressed itself mainly to bacterial infections acquired in the community as well as in the one million acute hospital beds in this country. None of the authors who discussed problems needing clinical investigation referred to infection surveillance or control among approximately