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Health care–associated infections affect 1.7 million hospitalizations each year, but the clinical and economic costs attributable to these infections are poorly understood. Reliable estimates of these costs are needed to efficiently target limited resources for the greatest public health benefit.

Acinetobacter is an increasingly important hospital‐associated pathogen. Multidrug resistance among Acinetobacter species continues to rise, and infection with these multidrug‐resistant organisms has a profound negative impact on patient outcomes. Carbapenem resistance is frequently used by hospitals as a definition for multidrug resistance among Acinetobacter species, because it is often associated with resistance to other antibiotic classes.

In an analysis of more than 300 microbiology labs serving hospitals all over the United States, researchers found that the proportion of MRSA cases in outpatients nearly doubled between 1999 and 2006. The study found that much of the growing burden of MRSA was associated with a greater proportion of newer “community-associated” strains of MRSA, which rose in outpatient units from 3.6 percent to 28.2 percent—amounting to a seven-fold jump during the study period.

Despite significant concern in the health care community regarding vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), there are no estimates of the total number of VRE infections that occur each year in US hospitals. Using data from a national survey of hospital discharges and a national antimicrobial resistance surveillance system, we estimated the annual number of US hospitalization with VRE bloodstream, urinary tract, and wound or intra-abdominal infections.

The overprescription of antibiotics in the United States can be attributed to two main causes: maximization of individual benefit, and social norms that often defy rationality. Policy solutions to growing antimicrobial resistance aimed at changing behavior within the physician- patient dyad are largely ineffective, as neither party has a strong disincentive to prescribe or use these generally safe drugs, and present illness weighs far heavier than potential future resistance.

Hospital-acquired infections with Staphylococcus aureus, especially methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) infections, are a major cause of illness and death and impose serious economic costs on patients and hospitals. However, the recent magnitude and trend of these infections have not been reported. We used national hospitalization and resistance data to estimate the annual number of hospitalizations and deaths associated with S. aureus and MRSA from 1999 through 2005. During this period, the estimated number of S.