Book excerpt: The Guest Editors, coming from the Critical Care Medicine Department in the NIH, are the top thought leaders in the area of infections in critical care. Their topic selections in this issue reflect the most clinically relevant and current information. The issue specifically covers the following topics: Catheter-related bloodstream infections: special considerations in diagnosis in the ICU; Sepsis-How does the new definition help clinicians; Therapeutic drug monitoring of antibiotics; High containment pathogen preparation; Multidrug resistant gram negative infections and enterococcus; Strategies to prevent transmission of resistant organisms; Antibiotic Stewardship: What the intensivist should know; C. Difficile infection in the ICU; Immunocompromised critically ill; Rapid diagnostics: The use of procalcitonin; Respiratory viruses in the ICU: Significance of rhino/rsv updates/adenovirus metapneumovirus; Management of invasive fungal disease in the ICU; Inhaled/Nebulized antibiotics. Infectious disease physicians and intensivists will be armed with the information they need to diagnose and treat patients with infections in the ICU.