New professor fights resistant bacteria
Christina Vandenbroucke-Grauls is the newly-appointed professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University. Her work includes research on the detection and containment of infections that develop and spread in hospitals.
Hospital-acquired infections are infections that develop while patients are admitted to the hospital. These infections occur because patients often undergo treatments that weaken their immune system, like cancer treatments or undergo surgical procedures that break the normal body barriers. In Denmark, the Ministry of Health estimates that up to 60,000 patients contract a hospital-acquired infection every year. While most of these infections are not very severe and can easily be treated with antibiotics, hospital-acquired infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be difficult to deal with – and potentially life-threatening for weakened patients.
Christina Vandenbroucke-Grauls is particularly interested in the infections that ordinary antibiotic treatment cannot treat; she studies how antibiotic-resistant bacteria spread, and which measures are needed to control their spread, both in hospitals and in the general population. She hopes that her research can also contribute to better understanding how to control the spread of viral infections, for example in connection with pandemics such as the present one.
Contact
Professor Christina Vandenbroucke-Grauls
Aarhus University, Department of Clinical Medicine – Department of Clinical Epidemiology
Mobile: +31 622992335
Email: cvg@clin.au.dk