June 15 was World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, a day on which agencies like the National Center on Elder Abuse are encouraging "dynamic involvement from not only the aging services and affiliated networks, but also from the public at large to recognize elder abuse as a widespread societal issue and to take action in preventing it."

States that set high staffing standards for elder care in nursing homes are the only ones that come close to having enough staff nurses to prevent serious safety violations, according to a new study by a professor in the UCSF School of Nursing.

A Rhode Island Hospital study presented today at the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) annual meeting found that patients in long-term elder care and HIV-infected outpatients appear to be high-risk groups for carriage of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a common cause for health care associated infections.

In the later years of life, chronic diseases and other health problems tend to accumulate and negatively affect an individual's health, according to reports published in the latest issue of The Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences (Vol. 62A, No. 3). In a special section devoted to the presence of coexisting medical conditions - known as comorbidity - this edition of the journal features four separate articles on the topic.