And now I'd like to start with a brief introduction regarding the impact of infectious diseases in critical care. So I think we all appreciate the broad and pervasive impact of infectious diseases in the practice of critical care medicine. Infection is among the most prevalent underlying conditions in ICUs globally. This has been looked at periodically about every decade or so in a series of studies known as the EPIC studies. So the EPIC-3 study was published in 2020. This is a point prevalence study of a 24-hour period on the 13th of September in 2017, looking at 1,150 hospitals in 88 countries. Looking at just the snapshot of what's going on in critical care, at that one day, 54% of patients on that day in the ICU had a suspected or confirmed infection. 70% of all patients were receiving one or more antimicrobial drugs on that day, either for prophylaxis or for treatment. And there was, among those infected patients, a 30% mortality. So a very high burden of infection, a very heavy use of antimicrobial drug therapy, and a very high mortality among these patients under our care. So looking forward into the future, because this session is a future-focused session, what are the threats we face in critical care medicine where infectious diseases are concerned? Well, a small but, I think, important group of them are, first of all, the growing tide of antimicrobial resistance. And we see this in our practices every day. Of course, no one who's been through the COVID-19 pandemic needs to be told much more about the threat of emerging infectious diseases and future diseases, either undiscovered or newly emerging with changes in global travel, in construction and human entry into new regions, alterations in the human-animal interface, and the like. We also are facing pre-existing challenges with culture-based diagnostics, that there is an intrinsic time delay to how we diagnose particularly bacterial infections in the ICU. And lastly, how do we better detect sepsis? How do we best identify those patients with infection who are at a higher risk of mortality and require earlier and more aggressive intervention? Alongside these threats, though, we have a lot of advances. We have, after many years, an expanded antimicrobial pipeline with new drugs available to us and hopefully new ways to use those drugs. We are rapidly seeing an explosion of novel biomarkers that can help us identify sick patients faster. We're seeing a real growth in rapid molecular diagnostics and non-culture-dependent identification of pathogens. The picture here on the right is Afani Hesse, who in the 1880s was really the leader who developed the agar-based culture methods that we still use today and are really the foundation of much of medical microbiology. We are looking, with these new technologies, to move beyond Afani Hesse's work, but we're also looking to build upon Afani Hesse's work to expand the kind of innovation that made microbiologic diagnosis possible back in the 1800s and 1900s to take it to the next level. Lastly, we are seeing the development of improved systems of care for these high-consequence pathogens, for viral hemorrhagic fevers, for novel respiratory diseases, and the like. So what this session is not, this session is not going to be a review of different types of infections encountered in the ICU. This is not going to be an exhaustive discussion of bugs and drugs for this pathogen treated with this agent, this other pathogen treated with this other agent. Rather, what this session is, is a review of novel systems, technologies, and approaches for the care of the infected patient for the 21st century ICU. So with that, thank you so much for being here today. It is an exciting time to care for patients with infection in the ICU. We really do have a unique opportunity to improve care for all. And please reach out after the session with any questions or concerns. And with that, we'll turn it over to our speakers.

Infectious diseases

critical care medicine

ICU

antimicrobial drug therapy

mortality rate