Postoperative spinal wound infection is a potentially devastating complication after operative spinal procedures. Despite the utilization of perioperative prophylactic antibiotics in recent years and improvements in surgical technique and postoperative care, wound infection continues to compromise patients' outcome after spinal surgery. In the modern era of pending health care reform with increasing financial constraints, the financial burden of post-operative spinal infections also deserves consideration. The aim of our work is to give to the reader an updated review of the latest achievements in prevention, risk factors, diagnosis, microbiology and treatment of postoperative spinal wound infections. A review of the scientific literature was carried out using electronic medical databases Pubmed, Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus for the years 1973-2012 to obtain access to all publications involving the incidence, risk factors, prevention, diagnosis, treatment of postoperative spinal wound infections. We initially identified 119 studies; of these 60 were selected. Despite all the measures intended to reduce the incidence of surgical site infections in spine surgery, these remain a common and potentially dangerous complication.