Group items tagged

CONAN: Well, is there something that - some things that every hospital or every clinic should be doing in order to minimize the risk? PERENCEVICH: I think one of the most important things they can do is make sure their microbiology lab is able to detect these strains.

Unfortunately, when laboratory methods rely solely on cultivation of pathogens and traditional phenotypic methods of pathogen characterization, physicians are forced to deduce the presence of BSI based on clinical symptoms, which are often nonspecific. Subsequently, antibiotic therapy is initiated based on clinical and epidemiologic profiles (28) rather than on laboratory evidence. Typically, within 1 to 3 days a microscopic Gram stain category (Gram-positive bacteria, Gram-negative bacteria, or fungi) provides physicians with a general direction for antibiotic therapy. Definitive results that eliminate the need for broad-spectrum therapy and enable de-escalation and the tailoring of treatment to the most effective antibiotic regimen often require more than 3 to 5 days. This gap has been implicated as one reason for high mortality and the emergence of drug-resistant microbes.

In high school, he considered becoming an architect but, he later recalled, decided he wanted to be a chemist after taking an experimental course that encouraged “unexpected smells and disruptions of nearby classes,” he wrote in the Annual Review of Microbiology in 1981.

During that suit, Dr. Waksman said that in isolating streptothricin, Dr. Woodruff had contributed “as much as 20 times” more than Dr. Schatz to the later discovery of streptomycin,

“The studies of Albert Schatz in his discovery of streptomycin,” he said, “were dependent on the initial antibiotic demonstration by Boyd Woodruff that one could isolate soil microorganisms, culture them and recover inhibitory compounds from them.”

researchers found that children between the ages of 1 and 3 who were given the DTaP vaccine in their thigh instead of in their upper arm were around half as likely to have a local reaction

Some viruses, like influenza, are coated in lipids, “envelopes” that alcohol can rupture.

A new study finds that such transplants cured 15 of 16 people who had recurring infections with Clostridium difficile bacteria, whereas antibiotics cured only 3 of 13 and 4 of 13 patients in two comparison groups.

i diagnosed with HIV at birth and immediately put on antiretroviral therapy.

brought back into care at 23 months, despite being off treatment for five months, the child was found to have an undetectable viral load

d today no signs of HIV infection in the child can be detected by the most sensitive means available.

carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE

"They're basically a triple threat."

they are resistant to virtually all antibiotics