The November issue of the JHI marks World Antibiotic Awareness Week with a special section on antibiotic stewardship. The issue also features the 2018 Lowbury Lecture by Professor Susan Huang addressing the use of chlorhexidine decolonization to prevent HCAI and MDROs. There is plenty more of interest in the rest of the Journal. Particularly timely for our northern hemisphere readers are paper on norovirus infection and viral respiratory infections. These include an interesting review of outbreaks of norovirus infection in Norway since 2005 that shows how hospital outbreaks often precede outbreaks in long-term care facilities. Outside the special section there are several other interesting papers. Amongst these, the Editor’s Choice this month is the systematic review of indoor hospital air and the impact of ventilation on bioaerosols by Stockwell et al. Another article well worth a read is the report by Cole and Talmadge of an intriguing engineered sink to address hospital infection prevention. The final article to highlight is a mammoth cross sectional study of hospital onset diarrhoea in the UK, which showed that thousands of patients are affected each day, with only a third having any medical assessment.