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Objectives: the authors aim to show the possibility of stigma that hits affected Mpox patients because of the statements of society involving their sexual sphere.Design: 23 July 2022, the Director-General of the WHO, Thedos Ghebreyesus, issued an international public health alert regarding cases of Mpox (formerly known as Monkeypox). Although Mpox has been present in an endemic form for years in some Central African countries, the spread of the disease outside Africa has aroused considerable alarm in populations already sorely afflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Aside from the data, what is striking is that Mpox, like other infectious diseases, seems to have become a problem only when it began to cross the borders of Africa. Some may justify this attitude simply by ascribing it to the fear of an epidemic outside the areas where the virus is endemic. However, in such cases, and especially after the Covid-19 experience, other factors are also involved: lack of information and, even more so, the human capacity to utilise diseases to reinforce arguments against the tendencies, inclinations, orientations and behaviours of some social groups. Such information, albeit basically correct, is nevertheless incomplete. Moreover, it tends to prompt a view of this disease that may give rise to highly dangerous and embarrassing situations, engendering the risk of repeating the error that was made about AIDS. Mpox is the latest in a series of epidemics that have struck humanity in the space of very few years. Setting and partecipants: People and social groups who, due to sexual orientations and behaviours, are considered to be at risk of being infected with Mpox.Main outcomes measures: - outcomes directly related to mental health of Mpox patients: anxiety, fear and depression, emotional difficulties, feelings of loneliness and isolation; - well-being outcomes of people with Mpox; - c. risk of not being able to reduce the epidemic among those groups don’t feel as though they belong

Recent years have seen increasingly severe natural disasters, the consequences of which have been catastrophic. Clearly, our global environment is undergoing major changes. The climate is becoming deranged and pollution on a global scale afflicts air, water, and land. We are faced with an unprecedented shortage of cultivable land and fresh water for drinking, irrigation, and livestock farming, while our marine systems are breaking down.  These environmental changes are anthropogenic; they are caused by human activities that are potentially dangerous for both the environment and human life. Moreover, not only do they have an enormous impact on the environments in which we live and on our way of life, they also have harmful effects on our health. Indeed, we must understand that our body - as Hippocrates explained long ago - is a system that constantly interacts with the surrounding environment.

Introduction: We described an outbreak of C. difficile that occurred in the Internal Medicine department of an Italian hospital and assessed the efficacy of the measures adopted to manage the outbreak.Methods: The outbreak involved 15 patients and was identified by means of continuous integrated microbiological surveillance, starting with laboratory data (alert organism surveillance).Diarrheal fecal samples from patients with suspected infection by C. difficile underwent rapid membrane immuno-enzymatic testing, which detects both the presence of the glutamate dehydrogenase antigen and the presence of the A and B toxins.Extensive microbiological sampling was carried out both before and after sanitation of the environment, in order to assess the efficacy of the sanitation procedure.Results: The outbreak lasted one and a half month, during which time the Committee for the Prevention of Hospital Infections ordered the implementation of multiple interventions, which enabled the outbreak to be controlled and the occurrence of new cases to be progressively prevented.The strategies adopted mainly involved patient isolation, reinforcement of proper hand hygiene techniques, antimicrobial stewardship and environmental decontamination by means of chlorine-based products. Moreover, the multifaceted management of the outbreak involved numerous sessions of instruction/training for nursing staff and socio-sanitary operatives during the outbreak.Sampling of environmental surfaces enabled two sites contaminated by C. difficile to be identified.Conclusions: Joint planning of multiple infection control practices, together with effective communication and collaboration between the Hospital Infections Committee and the ward involved proved to be successful in controlling the outbreak.

OBJECTIVE. To describe the occurrence of CRKP infections in a tertiary care hospital and to analyse the allelic profiles of the clinical strains involved and the most frequent carbapenemases.DESIGN. The study analyzed cases of infection due to CRKP in the period 2013-2014. 147 cases of CRKP infection were recorded most of which (82.31%) were in-hospital infections.SETTING. One hospital in northern Italy.METHODS. We retrospectively collected: data on patient characteristics, microbiological characteristics of CRKP. The isolates from 72 of the-hospital cases underwent molecular typing (MLST); in addition, in each isolate, a procedure for the detection of the blaKPC gene was carried out.RESULTS: The in-hospital death rate was 24.0% in 2013 and 37.5% in 2014. However, the difference between these two values did not prove statistically significant (P> .05).Analysis of mortality revealed that bloodstream infections were more frequently associated with death than other infections (CHI2=14.57, P<.001). The age-adjusted Cox proportional hazard model revealed that the patients with bacteremia due to CRKP had a 3-fold higher risk of death (HR 3.11; 95% CI 1.66 - 5.84, P< .001) than those with infections of other sites.MLST revealed that the prevalent allelic profile was ST 512 (79.62%); the most frequent carbapenemase was KPC-3 (83.8%).CONCLUSIONS. Our results are in line with those of recent studies, which have shown that the spread of CRKP in Italy is a matter of concern and further efforts have to been made to prevent, whenever possible, the potential dissemination of carbapenemase-producing clones of K. pneumoniae.