Intensive care units are there to provide life support and critical care to patients in serious conditions of injury or ill-health, with physicians and nursing staff closely monitoring all the vital signs. The conditions of ICU patients demand permanent vigilance from the medical team and quick action to reestablish and stabilize health and assure survival.
The ICU staff is a multi-professional team, consisting of specialist doctors, a clinical pharmacist, physiotherapists, a nutritionist, psychologist, speech therapist, and social worker, among others. The increase in the number and complexity of ICUs has given rise to a new medical specialty: intensive care medicine, which requires specialized, certified practitioners. In addition to being specialist intensivists, many of these doctors have a second specialty, such as infectology, pneumology, nephrology, gastroenterology, surgery, cardiology, or anesthesiology, among others.
ICUs and antifungal drugs
ICU patients are generally in a very frail state when it comes to fighting infection. This is why ICU teams have to be always alert to the risk of bacterial or fungal infection. Prime candidates for fungal infection include patients with compromised immune systems, those undergoing lengthy antibiotic treatments, or those requiring long-term or multi catheter use. As a rule, treatment is empirical and involves broad-spectrum antifungal drug application. Invasive fungal infections can kill so quickly there is sometimes not even enough time for the hospital lab to identify the agent of infection; hence the need for empirical treatment using broad-spectrum antifungals. For the doctors, the ideal antifungal is of broad-spectrum application with little inter-drug interference and a good profile for tolerability.
United Medical and the Treatment of Invasive Fungal Infections
United Medical provides doctors with one of the most advanced medications for treating invasive fungal infections in ICU patients. Though scientists from all over the world continue to revolutionize medicine with each passing day, we know that critical patients cannot afford to wait. That is why we are committed to widening access to innovations that can bridge the gap between the research lab and the hospital bedside. We are united behind a single aim: to equip health professionals who save and prolong lives with the most advanced therapies science has to offer.
Links
AMIB – Associação de Medicina Intensiva Brasileira - www.amib.com.br
SBI - Sociedade Brasileira de Infectologia - www.sbinfecto.org.br
Aspergilose pulmonar - www.abcdasaude.com.br/artigo.php?39
O Desafio das Infecções Fúngicas no Século XXI - www.ccih.med.br/fungos21.html
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