We feel that it is time to retire the legal mandates for using contact precautions for the control of endemic MRSA and VRE in the hospital, which we just published today in Journal of the American Medical Association (with my colleagues Drs. Dan Morgan and Richard Wenzel). The article is free and available full text online.Contact precautions for the control of these endemic pathogens should be used selectively as guided by local need and not by mandate, after a high reliability, horizontal infection prevention program has been implemented.
We welcome the ongoing debate.
