Skin Infections & Dermatologic Conditions

Cellulitis is a spreading bacterial skin infection presenting with redness, warmth, swelling, and pain with poorly defined borders — a key nursing action is marking the visible edge of redness with a pen and noting the time, so any spread beyond the mark over the next few hours is caught early and treated as worsening infection rather than assumed stable. Herpes zoster (shingles) presents as a painful, blistering rash in a band-like pattern along a single dermatome (reflecting reactivation of the chickenpox virus in one nerve root) — standard precautions plus contact precautions are used for a localized case in an immunocompetent patient, escalating to airborne precautions if the rash is disseminated (widespread) or the patient is immunocompromised, since the virus becomes more transmissible in those situations.