As the current infection control officer for Pasco County Fire Rescue, USF College of Public Health alumna Dr. Christine McGuire-Wolfe has seen her fair share of occupational exposure cases.

“It’s hard to convince people who are running into burning buildings that catching Hepatitis C is a risk, because the risk that’s right in their face is fire-related—something is going to fall on you or burn up and you’re going to get trapped and I’m over in the corner telling them ‘you need your Hepatitis C screening,’ so it can be a challenge sometimes,” she said.

McGuire-Wolfe is an adjunct faculty member in the infection control program in the Department of Global Health. She teaches the cornerstone undergraduate course for the undergraduate minor in infection control and saw a need for a more comprehensive but understandable textbook to share with her students.

“I was looking at potential textbooks for the class and they were either too simplified or they were super expensive and too filled with jargon that undergrads not working in health care would understand,” she said.

Now, she’s taken her practical experience and knowledge of infection control and prevention and shared it in Foundations of Infection Control and Prevention, published by Jones and Bartlett Learning.

According to McGuire-Wolfe, the book contains a foundation of critical concepts in infection control for those with no prior exposure to medical terminology, offering hands-on, practice examples of specific pathogens, avoiding technical jargon, while not compromising comprehensiveness.

“We tried to tie in a lot of practical scenarios,” she said. “Each chapter has some practical situations where it’s applied, so it’s not just rote memorization of facts, there is some application piece to it as well.”

Each chapter discusses a specific pathogen for the reader to gain knowledge of common diseases in the developed world and serves as a useful took for studying for the Certification in Infection Prevention and Control (CIC^®) examination administered by the Certification Board of Infection Control and Epidemiology.

According to McGuire-Wolfe, professionals in the field of infection control are reaching retirement, so there is an increasing need to train new professionals.

“Antimicrobial resistance and health care related infections are growing astronomically,” she said.

As a professional working on the front line of infection control, she’s able to bring real life examples to her class in addition to examples highlighted in the textbook.

“I’ve been unusually busy with exposures at the fire department lately, so I’ve been able to bring in examples of live exposures, such as bacterial meningitis,” she said. “At the beginning of the class they are also getting a little clip of real life, so it’s more applicable for them.”

The book is available at Shimberg Health Sciences Library at USF Health and other major retailers including Amazon.com.

Story by Anna Mayor, USF College of Public Health