[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Page 15692]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        RECOGNIZING NIH RESEARCH

  Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, today I wish to honor Dr. Tara Palmore 
and Dr. Julie Segre, 2013 Federal Employees of the Year, for their 
ground-breaking research to stop the spread of deadly hospital-acquired 
infections. Each year approximately 100,000 patients die from hospital-
acquired infections. These deadly infections affect patients who are in 
the course of receiving healthcare treatment for other conditions; 
therefore, the patients often already have compromised immune systems. 
These two doctors created a revolutionary model to identify and halt 
the spread of infection for the rest of the health care industry to 
follow.
  Over the course of a 12-month period in 2011 and 2012, a rare and 
deadly ``superbug'' was spreading from patient to patient at one of the 
Nation's premier research hospitals, the National Institutes of 
Health's Clinical Center. This two-woman team--Dr. Tara Palmore, a 
deputy hospital epidemiologist, and Dr. Julie Segre, a senior 
investigator--partnered with a talented team of doctors to accomplish 
an extraordinary achievement. For the first time ever, they were able 
to sequence the bacteria's DNA to decipher how the pathogen spread from 
patient to patient. This allowed doctors to detect the origins of the 
infections, trace the transmission, and implement measures to put an 
end to the outbreak.
  Tragically, 18 seriously ill patients acquired the bacteria and seven 
ultimately died from the infection, but this use of genomics could 
profoundly change the way hospital-acquired infections are identified 
and halted, leading to quicker response times and saving tens of 
thousands of lives. Dr. Francis Collins, the Director of the NIH said,

       ``It is a groundbreaking advance in one hospital that will 
     now have an impact across the world and will become the 
     standard. It is a fantastic example of taking a challenging 
     medical problem and applying technologies in a new way to 
     come up with a remarkable result. We now have a new weapon in 
     the battle to stop the spread of drug-resistant organisms.''

  Dr. John Gallin, the Director of the NIH's Clinical Center, said the 
breakthrough by the NIH team is ``a magnificent demonstration of how a 
hospital can contain these infections when they occur.''
  There are a limited number of antibiotics available to fight these 
types of highly resistant bacteria, so this new discovery provides a 
new approach for hospital infection control that will benefit numerous 
patients in the future. I congratulate Drs. Palmore and Segre for their 
hard work and critical contributions to the health care community and 
to all of their colleagues for the great work at the National 
Institutes of Health.

                          ____________________