A Little Too Chaotic To Take Care Of MK-2206?
Our study had several limitations. The experience of the admitting physicians in this study might explain the good performance of clinical suspicion as compared with the CDR. The number of patients with culture-confirmed PTB was low, and we should be careful before generalizing our findings. Also, our study focused on patients with culture-proven PTB; only 53.8% TRIB1 of them had positive AFB sputum smears and were therefore highly contagious. Finally, our results may only apply to the patient population that we investigated, i.e. inpatients in a ward with a high prevalence of HIV infection. In conclusion, we suggest that the use of a CDR in addition to the clinical judgement of the admitting team might improve our decisions regarding the need for isolation of patients admitted with suspected PTB. Such a benefit needs to be further evaluated in a prospective study to assess the adequate isolation of all contagious patients while minimizing the unnecessary isolation of patients without PTB. The authors declare no conflicting interests. ""Clin Microbiol Infect 2011; 17: 365�C370 Bordetella pertussis is the aetiologic agent of whooping cough, a common cause of severe respiratory illness in children and prolonged mild cough in adults. To understand some of the reasons for differences in clinical symptoms between adults and children, we measured B.?pertussis DNA loads in nasopharyngeal swabs (NPS) from 19 adults and 40 children (including 14 infants) by quantitative IS481 real-time PCR. All Angiogenesis inhibitor cases had been pre-diagnosed with the B.?pertussis-specific loop-mediated isothermal amplification method. The mean PCR threshold cycles for adult and child NPS were 34.9 and 27.1, respectively, indicating a significantly lower B.?pertussis DNA load in adults than in children (p?Selleckchem MK-2206 a standard curve, the mean number of bacterial cells taken with a rayon-tipped swab from an adult, older child and infant was estimated to be 320 (95% CI 120�C910), 2.1?��?104 (95% CI 5.3?��?103 to 8.3?��?104) and 1.1?��?106 cells (95% CI 1.2?��?105 to 8.9?��?106), respectively. This indicates that the B.?pertussis load in NPS is closely correlated with patient age. Our observations suggest that adult pertussis is characterized by a lower bacterial load in the nasopharynx, resulting in milder symptoms and negative cultures. Bordetella pertussis, a highly communicable gram-negative coccobacillus, is the aetiologic agent of whooping cough, which has been a major acute respiratory infection, resulting in severe childhood illness and infant death [1]. In Japan, the incidence of pertussis cases in adolescents and, especially, adults, has significantly increased from the early 2000s; this has also been seen in other countries with high vaccination coverage [2].
