A Hospital. A place where you generally don't like to go, but are glad that it's there when you need it. A place that smells of disinfectant. It's called ‘clinically clean’. And then the inappropriate-sounding aliteration ‘hospital germ’. A place where you are supposed to get well becomes a threat to your health from pathogens that are often so persistent that there are hardly any effective drugs against them. Multi-resistant bacteria. How can that be? And above all: how can we deal with it? Prof Susanne Häußler and her Molecular Bacteriology research group at the HZI and the Twincore in Hanover are investigating this. In this episode, we talk about the clever strategies bacteria use to become multi-resistant hospital germs, how ways of dealing with them are being researched and what we can all do to protect ourselves and vulnerable patients from them.
At the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, scientists investigate the mechanisms of infectious diseases and their defences. We systematically develop the results of basic research towards medical applications. The scientific questions we work on include
To clarify such questions, we are investigating pathogens that are medically relevant or that can be used as models for research into infections. Understanding these mechanisms will contribute to combating infectious diseases with new drugs and vaccines.
Aims
The Centre's mission is to contribute to overcoming the challenges that infectious diseases pose to medicine and society in the 21st century. The HZI has defined its research priorities in the Infection Research Programme. The programme places particular emphasis on the transfer of research results into application, on individualised infection medicine and the application of information and data technologies for infection research.
If you would like to find out more about the HZI, take a look at www.helmholtz-hzi.de/en!