Challenges With Classifying and Treating Skin and Soft Tissue Infections

Michael D. Nailor, PharmD, BCPS-AQ ID, clinical associate professor at the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy, clinical specialist in infectious diseases at Hartford Hospital, and director of Infectious Disease Residency program at Hartford Hospital, discusses the biggest challenges associated with classifying and treating skin and soft tissue infections.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“As I mentioned before, there [are] a lot of different diagnoses that go into this, and the pathogenesis of the infection itself. If you have a trauma versus a person [who] develops spontaneous cellulitis, it makes classifying it more difficult.

The difficulty with the classification is the prognostic value of it, in terms of, how long do we have to treat everybody? Do people with cellulitis need to get treated [for] longer or shorter durations than [those with] abscesses? In the past, most trials have combined all these together. Certainly when you look at the FDA guidance for doing skin and soft tissue infection trials for new antibacterials coming to the market, they’re often, sort of a hodgepodge of different infections being [brought] together, and it doesn’t really describe to us how we [can] actually treat each one of these different types of infections individually.”