Emerging and Re-emerging Viral Infections

Prosthetic joint infection (PJI) remains one of the most common causes of revision arthroplasty. It can result in multiple revision surgeries and significant patient morbidity. Periprosthetic infection rates remain around 1-2% after primary total hip and knee arthroplasty and comprise approximately 7-12% of revision cases.Orthopedic hardware infections are much feared and costly complications that can occur when these devices are implemented both in traumatic cases as well as in joint replacement surgery. Because these infections can lead to great morbidity, it is important to understand their pathophysiology as well as the principles behind their diagnosis and initial treatment.The pathogenesis of these kind of infections is intimately connected to the property of production of biofilm by many microorganisms, which can have critical effect on the likely success of treatments. A multidisciplinary approach and the different opinions of the leading experts on the field will be discussed. This special issue will aim to identify the potential causes of these infections, to provide established diagnostic criteria guidelines, and to explain how these prosthetic infections are managed from an orthopedic surgery perspective and from clinical and diagnostic point of view.