With the many changes in healthcare, the occurrence of new and emerging infectious diseases, and pandemic of novel resistance mechanisms, the prevention of healthcare-associated infections (HAI) has become increasingly important. Borders are disappearing-not only between different healthcare settings locally or nationally-but also between developed and resource-limited countries, thereby transforming the fight against HAI into a truly global challenge. This change is reflected by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) choice of an infection control topic for the First Global Patient Safety Challenge-Clean Care is Safer Care-and the strong focus of the diagnostic and biomedical industry on HAI prevention and the control of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). According to WHO, hundreds of millions of patients develop HAI every year worldwide and as many as 1.4 million occur each day in hospitals alone [1]. The burden of disease is obviously much higher in low-and middleincome countries [2], but it is a challenge in itself to provide reliable global estimates and data are scarce from regions of the world where resources are the most limited [3]. Nevertheless, it is clear that a great number of global citizens suffer from preventable HAI. HAI are associated also with huge costs that are no longer affordable for most healthcare systems, including those in resource-rich countries.

AMR and the emergence of new pathogens and/or reemergence of old ones are influenced by a large variety of factors with many far beyond the boundaries of human medicine and local or even national practices. Pathogens that were initially strictly hospital-acquired, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), became community pathogens (CA-MRSA) and even zoonotic pathogens with the emergence of livestock-associated (LA)-MRSA, thereby totally changing the epidemiology of MRSA. CA-and LA-MRSA even pose a serious challenge