A new journal and new global perspective on infection control and public health

According to WHO, hundreds of millions of patients develop HAI every year worldwide and as many as 1.4 million occur each day in hospitals alone [1]. The burden of disease is obviously much higher in low- and middle-income countries [2], but it is a challenge in itself to provide reliable global estimates and data are scarce from regions of the world where resources are the most limited [3]. Nevertheless, it is clear that a great number of global citizens suffer from preventable HAI. HAI are associated also with huge costs that are no longer affordable for most healthcare systems, including those in resource-rich countries.AMR and the emergence of new pathogens and/or re-emergence of old ones are influenced by a large variety of factors with many far beyond the boundaries of human medicine and local or even national practices. Pathogens that were initially strictly hospital-acquired, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), became community pathogens (CA-MRSA) and even zoonotic pathogens with the emergence of livestock-associated (LA)-MRSA, thereby totally changing the epidemiology of MRSA. CA- and LA-MRSA even pose a serious challenge to the long admired "search and destroy" strategy. Many see the local or national prevalence of MRSA as a surrogate marker for the quality of infection control, and the increasing efforts of nations to address the challenge of ever-increasing MRSA rates seem to produce the right effect [4,5]. While certainly continuing to be a major challenge, the tide seems to be changing from Gram-positive to Gram-negative threats.Multidrug-resistant Gram-negatives expressing extended-spectrum beta-lactamases (ESBLs) or carbapenemases are already highly prevalent both in the community and the environment. Recent studies described that most pieces of retail meat contained ESBL [6]. In addition, New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1 (NDM-1) was isolated from drinking water [7]. This creates an unprecedented, large transmission route an