
Hygiene Tech Meets Healing Proteins
Growth factors, proteins or peptides found in nature, are important for the control of cell actions like growth, specialization, movement, and survival. They attach to certain receptors on cell surfaces, which starts signals inside the cells that change how they act. Growth factors are needed for body functions such as development in embryos, healing wounds, fixing tissues, and immune reactions.
Key Growth Drivers and Opportunities
High Cases of Hospital Acquired Infections: Hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) remain a major risk to patient safety and healthcare results around the world. These infections, often caused by bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium difficile, and Escherichia coli, usually happen because of long hospital stays, surgeries, poor infection control, and antibiotic resistance. Those in intensive care, people with weak immune systems, and those having surgery are at risk. HAIs raise sickness and death rates; these also cause higher medical costs and longer stays in hospitals.
Growing Geriatric Population: The growing geriatric population significantly contributes to the rise in hospital-acquired infections, as older adults often have weakened immune systems and require frequent medical care or hospitalization. This increases their vulnerability to infections, driving the demand for effective hospital infection prevention and control measures. As a result, healthcare facilities are investing more in disinfection, protective equipment, and sterilization solutions to ensure patient safety and reduce infection risks in aging populations.
Challenges
Failure of end-users to follow infection prevention rules limits how well hospital infection control works. When staff, patients, or support people don't follow hygiene rules—such as washing hands, sterilizing tools, or using safety gear— the risk of contamination and infections rises.
Innovation and Expansion
NAVTA & Virox Launch Free Infection Control Training for Safer Vet Care
In March 2023, (National Association of Veterinary Technicians in America) NAVTA, Virox launch certificate program in infection prevention, to advance best practices in infection prevention.
This program is a free online program designed to provide professionals with the knowledge needed to reduce the risk of spreading infection and create a safer workplace for their team, patients, and clients.
NeoIPC Unveils Toolkit to Shield Newborns from Hospital Infections
In November 2023, The NeoIPC Consortium announced the launch of a new surveillance toolkit to help neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) track and prevent hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) in high-risk newborns, including very preterm infants.
This toolkit aims to standardize how infections are tracked in Newborn Intensive Care Units (NICUs) to allow for improved data gathering and assessment. It has tools, training, and reporting forms made for newborn care locations. By helping with early detection and response, this project hopes to lower infection rates and improve results for fragile newborns.
Inventive Sparks, Expanding Markets
The key players operating the hospital infection prevention and control market includes, 3M Company, Crosstex International, Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Belimed AG, among others. Worldwide business aims center on encouraging lasting growth, improving health and safety for the public, and boosting progress through cooperation.
About Author:
Prophecy is a specialized market research, analytics, marketing and business strategy, and solutions company that offer strategic and tactical support to clients for making well-informed business decisions and to identify and achieve high value opportunities in the target business area. Also, we help our client to address business challenges and provide best possible solutions to overcome them and transform their business.
TIME BUSINESS NEWS
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Buzz Feed
12 hours ago
- Buzz Feed
Why IKEA Turned Away My Son: A Parent's Warning
In late June, a few days before Disability Pride Month began, I took my 7-year-old child on an outing to an Ikea store. As I filled out a waiver so he could enter the store's small play area, I noticed I was the only parent present. It turned out that parents typically drop off their children while they shop, but that wasn't an option for me. My son has a rare, severe form of epilepsy called Dravet syndrome, among other medical conditions, and he can't be without a grown-up carrying his seizure rescue medication, as I was. The scary reality is that around one in five children with Dravet syndrome die in childhood because the seizures can be so severe. There is currently no cure. I explained this to a staff member and told her that I'd need to be in the room with my child. She informed me that no parents were allowed into the play area. 'But isn't there a policy for kids with disabilities?' I asked. She told me a service dog could accompany a child, but a parent could not. I stopped signing the form. I said to the staff member, 'That's discrimination against kids with disabilities.' She didn't respond. I hadn't known about the store's play area before this visit, and I had been happy to see that it wasn't a playground ― just a space with toys like a train set and dart board. Since my son had a seizure at an indoor playground a year ago, I'd stopped taking him to them. But now, even this play space was not an option for him. My child and I were both upset. He loves going to Ikea to walk through the showroom and eat in the cafeteria ― a place open enough that it was the only indoor restaurant he ate in during our four years of masking during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have several Ikea furniture items, including bunk beds, a coat/shoe cubby and a toy chest. He helped us build them all. Since his severe seizures began about two years ago, he's had to change his life in significant ways. Heat, sports, just running around to play, illness and excitement have all become triggers for him. Summer is especially hard — on hot days, he can't be outside. In fact, we had driven the hour to Ikea in traffic just so he could walk and have a change of scenery in a large, air-conditioned space because the temperature outside was dangerous for him. I told him, 'This isn't OK.' He said, 'We should talk to someone.' I was proud of him. After talking to a few staff members, we spoke with a manager, who said he wasn't familiar with the policy, and he'd get back to me the next day. He didn't. Later, I looked online, and there was a section on the Ikea website directing caretakers of children with disabilities to start a conversation with the Ikea store manager about how the child can best have their needs accommodated in the play area. I was hopeful that when we went in the future, we could show the policy to the staff. However, that doesn't undo the pain my child felt after hearing that he wasn't welcome in that play space because of his disabilities. During the hour-long car ride home afterward, we talked a lot about discrimination. I reinforced that what happened wasn't OK, and that the more than 3 million kids with disabilities in our country deserve to be included. I told him about my older sister, his late aunt, who had microcephaly and faced various barriers to equal access too, like having to sit on the sidelines of playgrounds in her wheelchair. It upset me. When I was 10 in 1993, I read about new accessible playgrounds in an issue of Scholastic News, and I hoped we could build one for her. Sadly, she died a few weeks later, but in her memory, my family and I worked with the Cincinnati Parks Department to build an accessible playground. My son thought that was cool. I also explained that many groups of people face discrimination for reasons such as gender, race, sexual orientation, immigration status and more, and we need to be allies and stand up against all forms of discrimination. I also told him that one way to help is to make disabilities more visible and raise awareness, as we have done in his school class for the past three years. This June, for Dravet Syndrome Awareness Month, he and I held a neighborhood lemonade and cupcake fundraiser and donated money to the Dravet Syndrome Foundation, which helps fund the kind of critical epilepsy research that the Trump administration has recently cut. After our experience at Ikea, as one of his bedtime books, we re-read the picture book All the Way to the Top, about a child who protested and helped advocate for the Americans with Disabilities Act, which passed 35 years ago. Afterward, I told him about children with disabilities who went to Congress this summer, asking their leaders not to make it harder for them to go to the doctor and get the medicine and treatment they need. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump's domestic policy bill has since passed, and many people, including children with disabilities, will be harmed as a result. Two days after the bill passed, my child woke up and said, 'I want to make a sign about disabilities.' He asked for my help with spelling before writing the words 'People with disabilities are important' in pencil and then tracing over them with marker. He stood by our Disability Pride yard sign, and then, since the temperature was cooler out, he walked down our street and held it up for cars passing by. He said that when he grows up, he wants to be an 'activist' and 'protester.' I told him that he already is. [Editor's Note: HuffPost reached out for a response, and Ikea US issued the following statement: 'At IKEA, we strive to offer a safe and inclusive environment for children to play while in our stores. Our Småland policies are in place to keep children safe when they are in our space. Regarding this family's recent experience in our College Park, MD store, we are incredibly sensitive to feelings of exclusion, and so we have shared information with the family about our accommodations process, so that they may have a more positive experience at IKEA. We are constantly working to improve how we create an inclusive space while maintaining policies that keep all children safe.']
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Yahoo
We're Heading Toward A COVID Surge — Here's When It's Predicted To Peak
Those sniffles likely aren't a summer cold; COVID-19 is everywhere right now. And things are expected to get worse before they get better. Some experts predict virus rates will continue to rise as we ride out this summer infection surge. Jay Weiland, an infectious disease modeler, shared on social media that he predicts the summer COVID-19 wave will hit a peak in early September. So, now's the time to follow COVID prevention strategies such as wearing a mask in crowded spaces and washing your hands well. Related: Jenn Dowd, a professor of demography and population health at the University of Oxford in England, referenced Weiland's prediction model in her Substack newsletter, Data for Health, alongwith recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that shows COVID infections rising in all but five states. 'Since the data are lagging by a week, it's likely levels are already higher, with a predicted peak in early September, just in time for back-to-school,' Dowd wrote in her newsletter. This prediction should be taken with a grain of salt, though, experts say. COVID has proven to be anything but predictable over the last five-plus years. 'One thing to know is that a September peak is a best guess based on current trends, but we can't know for sure how big or long-lasting the current upswing in cases will be until we are on the other side of it,' Dowd told HuffPost via email. COVID levels are lower than last summer, thankfully, according to wastewater data and hospitalization levels, 'but, back-to-school could pour fuel on the fire of any viral spread, so we'll get a better picture in the next few weeks,' Dowd added. The models that are used to predict COVID peaks are an imperfect tool, but still contain valuable information, added Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist. 'If we look at the past, we've always had a summer wave [and] we've always also had a back-to-school flu season wave. So it's no surprise that they're cross-referencing both the historical incidence of COVID and what we're seeing in wastewater to say it's pretty likely that this many people probably have COVID right now, or may likely get COVID right now, because this many people are shedding the virus,' added Malaty Rivera. But, Malaty Rivera said that wastewater data is only accurate to a certain extent. 'You can't always say that the presence of virus [in wastewater] is infectious virus,' she explained. Wastewater data can't distinguish between active virus and non-infectious virus fragments from someone who was infected months ago, Malaty Rivera explained. (Just like how, early in the COVID pandemic, PCR tests could come back positive for months after someone recovered from a COVID-19 infection, she noted). Related: 'And so the presence of COVID-19 [in wastewater] is not necessarily the presence of active virus. It could be a virus from people who were sick weeks ago or months ago who are still shedding virus, but it's not an infectious virus,' she added. That being said, we are in a COVID surge right now and we should expect another bump as kids head back to school in September and as folks return from summer vacations, said Malaty Rivera. 'The fall, back to school, return from vacation, has always historically shown an uptick in respiratory illnesses, and COVID is not exclusive to that. COVID is now part of our annual cadence,' she said. 'And so the summer surge is no surprise, and to expect another bump is also completely based on evidence.' If you do get sick during the summer COVID wave, here's what you should do: If you get infected with COVID, the CDC's recommendations say you should stay home when you're sick and isolate from other people in your home. The CDC guidance goes on to say you can exit isolation once you're fever-free and your symptoms are improving or resolving for at least 24 hours. At this point, you can return to your daily life, but should take additional steps to protect others, such as wearing a mask, staying away from other people, and washing your hands frequently for five extra days. Malaty Rivera said you should take this one step further because 'resolving symptoms' is completely subjective, she noted. What's 'resolving' for one person could mean being very sick for another. 'And no fever... fever is not the only indicator... for infectiousness to others,' she added. 'Based on the evidence, if you are testing positive on a rapid antigen test, that means that you are likely infectious to others. If you are infectious to others, that means you should be isolating from other people and wearing a mask in indoor settings if you're forced to be in indoor settings with other people,' she said. Related: If you need fresh air, it's OK to go outside without a mask, but you shouldn't be close to other people, said Malaty Rivera. 'I don't think people should be unmasked in places with other people unless they are testing negative on an antigen test,' she said. If you are sick, you can also check with your doctor to see if you're eligible for Paxlovid, which is an anti-viral COVID medication, Malaty Rivera said. There are things you can do to prevent a COVID infection, too. 'If you didn't get an updated COVID vaccine in the past year, it might be a good time to get one, especially before any changes in eligibility come into effect,' said Dowd. If you are over 65 or immunocompromised, you're eligible for another COVID shot, she added, so long as you're six months out from your last dose. 'But, besides protection from vaccines, when there is more COVID around, it's a good time to ramp up our trusty precautions that work for most respiratory viruses,' Dowd said. Related: 'This includes paying attention to ventilation when socializing (such as being outside or opening doors and windows [and] using HEPA filters), staying home when sick and masking strategically in higher-risk situations like airplane travel or other crowded places,' noted Dowd. While COVID levels are lower than previous summer waves, it is still a serious infection that can lead to death, complications and long COVID. Do what you can to stay safe this summer, but 'with COVID prevention, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good,' Dowd said. 'You don't have to do everything right, but even small precautions can add up to lower transmission and protect our communities,' she noted. Related... The Most Common COVID Symptoms Doctors Are Seeing This Summer COVID Has Evolved, But Have COVID Tests? Experts Explain How Effective They Still Are RFK Jr.'s Latest Move On Vaccines Is Going To Hurt EveryoneSolve the daily Crossword


Chicago Tribune
18 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Got the sniffles? Here's what to know about summer colds and the COVID-19 variant called stratus
Summer heat, outdoor fun … and cold and flu symptoms? The three may not go together in many people's minds: partly owing to common myths about germs and partly because many viruses really do have lower activity levels in the summer. But it is possible to get the sniffles — or worse — in the summer. Federal data released Friday, for example, shows COVID-19 is trending up in most states, with emergency department visits up among people of all ages. Here's what to know about summer viruses. The number of people seeking medical care for three key illnesses — COVID-19, flu and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV — is currently very low, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Flu is trending down and RSV has been steady. But COVID-19 is trending up in most U.S. states. Wastewater data from around the country estimates 'moderate' COVID-19 activity. CDC wastewater also shows the XFG variant — nicknamed stratus — is most common in the U.S. Stratus can cause a 'razor blade' sore throat and is considered a 'variant under monitoring' by the World Health Organization. The WHO said the variant is only marginally better at evading people's immune systems and vaccines still work against it. The expectation is that COVID-19 will eventually settle into a winter seasonal pattern like other coronaviruses, but the past few years have brought a late summer surge, said Dr. Dean Blumberg, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at University of California Davis Children's Hospital. Other viruses circulating this time of year include the one that causes 'hand, foot and mouth' disease — which has symptoms similar to a cold, plus sores and rashes — and norovirus, sometimes called the stomach flu. Many viruses circulate seasonally, picking up as the weather cools in the fall and winter. So it's true that fewer people get stuffy noses and coughs in the summer — but cold weather itself does not cause colds. It's not just about seasonality. The other factor is our behavior, experts say. Nice weather means people are opening windows and gathering outside where it's harder for germs to spread. But respiratory viruses are still around. When the weather gets too hot and everyone heads inside for the air conditioning, doctors say they start seeing more sickness. In places where it gets really hot for a long time, summer can be cold season in its own right. 'I grew up on the East Coast and everybody gets sick in the winter,' said Dr. Frank LoVecchio, an emergency room doctor and Arizona State University researcher. 'A lot of people get sick in the summer here. Why is that? Because you spend more time indoors.' For people who are otherwise healthy, timing is a key consideration to getting any vaccine. You want to get it a few weeks before that big trip or wedding, if that's the reason for getting boosted, doctors say. But, for most people, it may be worth waiting until the fall in anticipation of winter cases of COVID-19 really tick up. 'You want to be fully protected at the time that it's most important for you,' said Dr. Costi Sifri, of the University of Virginia Health System. People at higher risk of complications should always talk with their doctor about what is best for them, Sifri added. Older adults and those with weak immune systems may need more boosters than others, he said. Last month, the CDC noted emergency room visits among children younger than 4 were rising. That makes sense, Blumberg said, because many young kids are getting it for the first time or are unvaccinated. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in May that the shots would no longer be recommended for healthy kids, a decision that health experts have said lacks scientific basis. The American Academy of Pediatrics still endorses COVID-19 shots for children older than 6 months. The same things that help prevent colds, flu and COVID any other time of the year work in the summer, doctors say. Spend time outside when you can, wash your hands, wear a mask. And if you're sick, stay home.