S. aureus vaccine development has proven particularly difficult. The conventional approach to achieve sterile immunity through opsonophagocytic killing has been largely unsuccessful. S. aureus is highly toxigenic and a great body of evidence suggests that a successful future vaccine for this organism should target extracellular toxins which are responsible for host tissue destruction and immuno...

let $pounds$ be the category of locally compact abelian groups and $a,cin pounds$. in this paper, we define component extensions of $a$ by $c$ and show that the set of all component extensions of $a$ by $c$ forms a subgroup of $ext(c,a)$ whenever $a$ is a connected group. we establish conditions under which the component extensions split and determine lca groups which are component projective. ...

To the Editor: The pathogenicity of Staphylococcus aureus depends on various bacterial surface components and extracellular proteins. However, the precise role of single virulence determinants in relation to infection is hard to establish. The frequent recovery of staphylococcal isolates that produce leukocidal toxins from patients with deep skin and soft tissue infections, particularly furuncu...

To the Editor: Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL) is a cytotoxin produced by Staphylococcus aureus that causes leukocyte destruction and tissue necrosis (1). Although produced by <5% of S. aureus strains, the toxin is detected in large percentages of isolates that cause necrotic skin lesions and severe necrotizing pneumonia (2). Although commonly associated with community-acquired methicillin-re...

Trichinella papuae and Trichinella zimbab-wensis induce infection in experimentally infected varans, caimans, pythons and turtles. Trichinellosis: recommendations on methods for the control of Trichinella in domestic and wild animals intended for human consumption. La Rosa G. PCR-derived methods for the identification of Trichinella parasites from animal and human samples. The identification an...

fections. Prevalence of MRSA and distribution of MRSA sequence types in livestock in Italy are not known. However, surveys of foods of animal (pig) origin have showed an MRSA prevalence of 3.7% (1,10). In view of the low prevalence of MRSA ST398 in patients with no exposure to animals, food products currently seem to play a negligible role. However, this clone is likely spreading because of the...