Introduction

     The field of infection has great advance in the 21st century. The health and longevity of the people all over the world get much improvement due to good infection management. The development of the antibiotics brings excellent control of many infectious diseases, and the application of vaccination also makes the disappearance of many terrible diseases possible, like small pox. However, the resistance of clinical pathogens, the increasing numbers of immunocompromised patients after transplantation and immunosuppressant use, and the emerging diseases of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), all give great challenge to an infection specialist. In the near future, we can see there will be a continuous fight between microorganisms and human, and the infection specialists will play an important role there.
 

Service

     The service provided by Division of Infectious Diseases includes the care of hospitalized patients with various infectious diseases and outpatients in the Department of Internal Medicine, consultation from other departments, and infection control of the hospital. We continue to monitor the trend of susceptibility of the isolates of clinical pathogens, which is important for the decision making of antibiotic use.
 

Teaching

     The extent of teaching in the Division involves the lectures, small group discussion, and bedside teaching for the medical students of the 4th, 5th, and 6th grade medical students, the interns of the medical students(7th grade), the general knowledge of infection and antibiotic use for the junior residents of internal medicine, and the training of fellows of infectious diseases. Our division is also responsible for lectures concerning the infectious diseases for the students in school of dentistry, pharmacy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and etc. Our division also helps the clinical practice of the students of the graduate institute of clinical pharmacy. The regular activities in our division include the morning meeting and ward round of attending physicians everyday, teaching round by chief of our division, infection conference, AIDS conference, journal reading, and book reading weekly.
 

Research

     There are many good articles published in numerous famous international journals. The topics of the articles include the infection control of infectious diseases, resistance of clinical pathogens, analysis of antibiotic use, and the management of overuse of antibiotics and spread of resistant pathogens in Taiwan. With the effort of all the colleagues, our division also has brilliant study results in the fields of AIDS, nosocomial infection, fungal infection, infection-related immunity, and infection of unusual pathogens.