The effectiveness of 13 antimicrobial agents against 51 clinical isolates of Nocardia was determined with use of agar dilutions and disk diffusion method. Amikacin inhibited less than 90% of isolates and, like the other aminoglycosides, showed good correlation between minimal inhibitory concentrations and sizes of zones of inhibition around the disks. Both sulfisoxazole and trimethoprim-sulfame...

Staphylococcus aureus remains a versatile and dangerous pathogen. Small-colony variants (SCVs) of S. aureus are a naturally occurring sub-population, first described nearly 100 years ago. These variants, of which there are different classes, grow slowly and have many atypical characteristics thought to be due to defective electron transport, and include minute colony forms. SCVs have been isola...

MICs of piperacillin/tazobactam are conventionally determined by varying the concentration of piperacillin in the presence of a fixed 4 mg/L tazobactam. When tested in this way, the MIC distribution for Klebsiella isolates with extended-spectrum beta-lactamases (ESBLs) is strongly bimodal, such that many producers are inhibited at 16 + 4 mg/L whilst others require MICs of > or =512 + 4 mg/L. Wh...

INTRODUCTION Cotrimoxazole (CTX) prophylaxis is recommended by the World Health Organisation for HIV infected persons. However, once HIV infected patients have commenced ART in resource limited settings, the benefits of continued CTX prophylaxis are not known. The few studies that investigated the safety of discontinuing CTX prophylaxis in these settings had limitations due to their design. M...

The primary objectives of this analysis were to determine which pharmacokinetic model most accurately describes the elimination pathways for piperacillin in the presence of tazobactam through population pharmacokinetic modeling and to characterize its pharmacodynamic profile. Once the optimal pharmacokinetic model was identified, Monte Carlo simulation of 10,000 subjects with ADAPT II was perfo...

A novel MatLab-based diffraction tool for the investigation of scattered fields around a two-dimensional Perfectly Electric Conductor (PEC) wedge is introduced. Analytical (Exact by Integral, as well as some High Frequency Asymptotic (HFA) techniques) and numerical (Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD)) models are included. The FDTD staircase modeling problems are removed by the application of ...

The antibacterial activity of trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole against 99 strains of Staphylococcus epidermidis was tested on media known to be low in thymidine content, as determined by screening with Streptococcus faecalis. Eighty-one percent of the isolates were susceptible by agar dilution. Trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole was bactericidal against two strains of S. epidermidis when thymidine phos...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the impact of isoniazid prophylaxis on mortality and incidence of tuberculosis in children with HIV. DESIGN Two centre prospective double blind placebo controlled trial. PARTICIPANTS Children aged > or =8 weeks with HIV. INTERVENTIONS Isoniazid or placebo given with co-trimoxazole either daily or three times a week. SETTING Two tertiary healthcare centres in So...

A lot of practical applications show that DS (Dempster-Shafer) theory of evidence cannot deal with highly conflicted evidence. For this problem, Murphy proposed a method to solve it by modifying source model of evidence. But this method just calculated the mean of the conflicted evidence and didn’t pay much attention on their correlation. Based on the combination method of Murphy, a new method ...

In this paper, a new method for merging multiple inconsistent knowledge bases in the framework of possibilistic logic is presented. We divide the fusion process into two steps: one is called the splitting step and the other is called the combination step. Given several inconsistent possibilistic knowledge bases (i.e. the union of these possibilistic bases is inconsistent), we split each of them...