This month's cover features agar art, titled 50 Shades of Antimicrobial Resistance, by Luis Mota-Bravo, Amara Thind, Nicholas Ramirez, Betsy Juarez, and Michelle Kalu of the University of California, Irvine. Agar art is created by applying microbes to an agar plate and adding chemicals to produce the coloring.
This artwork was composed with antibiotic-resistant bacteria primarily of the Enterobacteriaceae family. It was a finalist in the 2017 Agar Art Contest held by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), which started the annual contest in 2015 to "share the beautiful and diverse world of microbes with the public." Since the contest's inception, the ASM has since received hundreds of agar art submissions from around the world. (Visit https://asm.org/Events/2019-ASM-Agar-Art-Contest to see them.)
In this month's first CE article, author Douglas Houghton discusses the evidence surrounding some of the most common infections in the acute care setting-community- and hospital-acquired pneumonia, surgical site infections, and Clostridioides difficile infection-as well as recommendations for their prevention and control. To learn more, read "Infection in Acute Care: Evidence for Practice" in this issue.-Diane Szulecki, editor