Dangerous central-line bloodstream infections are down almost a third in U.S. hospitals, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And our updated Hospital Ratings, released this month, show a similar improvement in intensive care units. But despite the progress, these deadly infections—which are almost entirely preventable—remain widespread among hospitals nationwide.

Some 14,000 Americans die every year from a bacterial infection known as Clostridium difficile, or C. diff. for short, and another 300,000 are hospitalized, according to a report released today from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And unlike other hospital-acquired infections, those numbers are going up instead of down—largely due to the rise of antibiotic-resistant strains of the bacteria.

You now have access to more information about hospital safety, thanks to a step taken by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The agency released bloodstream-infection rates in intensive care units for 1,146 hospitals in Washington D.C. and all states except Wyoming. Nearly a third of the hospitals reported no infections during the reporting period. However, the release covers only the three-month period from January to March, 2011. More data, including from Wyoming, will be added later in the year.

Infections in pediatric intensive care units put children's lives at risk and occur all too often, according to a new investigation from the Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center. We found that pediatric ICUs often have higher infection rates than adult ICUs, and that some hospitals do much better than others at preventing infections.

Hospital employees report only 14 percent of medical errors and usually don’t change their practices to prevent future mistakes, according to a new study from the Office of the Inspector General and the Department of Health and Human Services. And while proposed new DHHS rules would encourage more reporting, they still don’t require that the information be made public.

A group of 32 advocates from our Safe Patient Project gathered at our headquarters in Yonkers yesterday to talk about making hospitals safer places for patients. One theme: Do your homework, and get information from lots of different sources. Here are five of their more unusual suggestions.

A few simple steps for handling central-line catheters in pediatric intensive care units saved more than a hundred children’s lives and millions of dollars, according to a study published online today in Pediatrics.

Three large hospital systems—Cleveland Clinic, Henry Ford in Detroit, and Parkview Health in Fort Wayne, Ind.—have stopped reporting data on hospital-acquired infections to the Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., according to our updated hospital Ratings. That deprives consumers of important information on hospital safety.

Hospitals got better at preventing four common and deadly hospital-acquired infections last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And our updated hospital Ratings show similar results. But there’s still plenty of room for improvement, and a need for broader access to data, say our hospital-infection experts.

The country’s leading hospital accreditation board recently released a list of 405 hospitals that it says scrupulously follow guidelines for treating heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, children’s asthma, and surgical care. The list, our experts say, is a step in the right direction in terms of making hospitals accountable. But it also has some shortcomings that highlight the problems consumers face when trying to get information about hospital performance.

A new study in the September issue of the American Journal of Infection Control found that 60 percent of physician coats and nurse uniforms at a large hospital in Israel carried potentially disease-causing bacteria, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

A study out today of 155,891 trauma patients found that those who develop infections in the hospital are more likely to die during their stay than others. Seems obvious, right? Yet this study is big news, since it provides concrete evidence of the extent and the danger of hospital-acquired infections, which are far more common and deadly than many people understand.

More than three-quarters of all operations in the U.S. are now done in outpatient clinics, not hospitals. But many of those clinics don’t adhere to standard infection-prevention practices. To help correct that problem, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today released new guidelines meant to prevent infections in in “ambulatory” surgery centers, primary-care offices, endoscopy clinics, and pain-management clinics.

One of the most important things to know about a hospital is how many of its patients develop infections. But hospitals often don’t release that data. To help motivate them, we put together a list of teaching hospitals that haven't made their information on infections easily accessible to the public.

The Boston vs. New York rivalry isn’t just the Red Sox vs. the Yankees. It’s which city, each known for its prestigious hospitals, has better medical care. Well, when it comes to preventing hospital-acquired infections at least, Boston wins, according to our updated hospital Ratings.