Association of a coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine booster with control of a COVID-19 outbreak in a long-term care facility in Switzerland, November to December 2021.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreaks in long-term care facilities are often correlated with high case fatality rates. We describe the association of administration of an mRNA booster with the control of an outbreak. Our findings highlight the possibility of vaccine booster early in an outbreak as a promising method to mitigate the spread of infection.

Legionella and risk management in hospitals-A bibliographic research methodology for people responsible for built environment and facility management.

An ongoing research project investigates the roles and duties of persons responsible for the built environment with respect to risk management of water systems and Legionella prevention from a facility management's perspective. Our literature review provides an approach for selecting and analysing abstracts of initially 177 journal articles, subjected to certain topic-specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. Different decision strategies of either logic 'yes/no', Boolean operators 'OR' or 'AND' and decisions for single counts or cumulative counts of the identified three principal keywords 'Legionella', 'hospital' and 'water', were completed. A final list of ten principal reference articles from 29 journals was compiled. It suggests that the interconnected perspective of water systems, Legionella and hospitals seems to be underrepresented in the field of the built environment and facility management. The term 'stakeholder', which would refer to decision-makers, was not found more than once. Our result is a useful summary of established sources of information on environmental Legionella research. The results can be helpful for those new to the topic.

The use of ziprasidone in clinical practice: analysis of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic aspects from data of a drug monitoring survey.

This study related clinical effects to daily doses and serum concentrations of ziprasidone by retrospective analysis of data from a therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) survey established for patients treated with the new antipsychotic drug. In the total sample of 463 patients ziprasidone doses ranged between 20 and 320 mg/d and correlated significantly (r(2)=0.093, P<0.01) with serum concentrations. The latter were highly variable within and between individual patients (between patients median 67 ng/ml, 25-75th percentile 40-103 ng/ml). Pharmacokinetic interactions with comedication played a minor role. According to the clinical global impressions (CGI) scale most of the 348 patients who were under antipsychotic monotherapy with ziprasidone were either much or very much improved (43.3 and 17.3%, respectively). The previously proposed therapeutic range of 50-130 ng/ml ziprasidone in serum or plasma, which can in effect be used interchangeable, was confirmed. In patients who were at least much improved and defined as "responders" mean serum concentrations of ziprasidone were 80 ng/ml and 78 ng/ml in patients who did not reach this improvement score. In patients with serum levels above or below 50 ng/ml, the number of responders was 66 or 63%, respectively. The difference between the two groups was not significant (P=0.375), and improvement or side effects did not correlate significantly (P>0.05) with doses or serum levels. It is concluded that TDM of ziprasidone may be useful for treatment optimization because of highly variable serum concentrations resulting under therapeutically recommended doses of the drug.