The University of Rochester Medical Center will receive up to $9 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, dedicated to watching for and researching infectious diseases over the next five years.
The award renews the university’s role as a member of the CDC’s Emerging Infections Program (EIP), a national network based at the URMC Center for Community Health that keeps an eye on infectious threats, including the flu, HPV and C. diff.
“This is the largest national surveillance system for infectious diseases, and most of what we know about the burden of infectious disease in the U.S. comes from the research conducted in this network,” said Nancy M. Bennett, M.D., director of the Center for Community Health and co-principal investigator of the New York State EIP in a news release Tuesday.
Ghinwa Dumyati, M.D., director of the Communicable Diseases Surveillance and Prevention program at the Center for Community Health, leads the program with Bennett.
Dumyati and Bennett’s team includes nurses, infection preventionists, and health project coordinators from the Center for Community Health. Over the next five years, they will continue to track influenza and assess the effectiveness of yearly vaccines.
The team will also work to determine the frequency of health care-associated infections like pneumonia and C. diff in nursing homes, and the emergence of antibiotic-resistant organisms.
