The One and Only Campaign for Injection Safety. In the past 10 years more than 100,000 patients were exposed to hepatitis and other blood-borne diseases because nurses and other health professionals outside hospitals failed to adhere to fundamental principles of infection control and injection safety.

The One and Only Campaign-with its "One needle, one syringe, only one time" slogan-is designed to teach nurses and other health care providers across health care settings, as well as patients, about safe injection practices. The campaign, which is being launched in Nevada, advocates evidence-based injection safety practices to ensure patient safety.

The One and Only Campaign is sponsored by the Safe Injection Practices Coalition, whose members include the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care, the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, the Ambulatory Surgery Foundation, the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the HONOReform Foundation. For more information about the campaign, go to http://www.oneandonlycampaign.org.

Sexually transmitted disease diagnoses increased from 2006 to 2007 in the United States, reports the CDC. But the 7.5% increase in the national rate of chlamydia (from 344.3 reported cases per 100,000 people in 2006 to 370.2 in 2007) may be due to increased screening and greater test sensitivity rather than to higher disease prevalence. A total of 1.1 million chlamydia diagnoses were reported in 2007, which the CDC estimates to be less than half the number of actual cases-"the largest number of cases ever reported to CDC for any condition." Women and racial minorities are most affected by chlamydia, which causes pelvic inflammatory disease in up to 40% of women, sometimes leading to infertility. Women also have a higher rate of gonorrhea infection than men (123.5 cases per 100,000 people versus 113.7). Gonorrhea is the second-most-reported U.S. infectious disease, with 355,991 cases in 2007.