OBJECTIVE To investigate the renal outcomes of children after exposure to low dose melamine in Hong Kong. DESIGN Cross sectional study. SETTING Special assessment centres, Hong Kong. PARTICIPANTS 3170 children (1422 girls and 1748 boys) aged 12 years or less referred from territory-wide primary care clinics after daily consumption for one month or more of milk products tainted with melami...

Two diabetic patients presented in coma to the accident and emergency department. Although they were hypoglycaemic, the initial blood glucose reagent strip readings were high. We postulate that glucose contamination of their fingers occurred and resulted in spuriously high readings. A small survey highlights the problems resulting from such contamination. Correct handling of blood glucose reage...

Most methods used in double esterase cytochemistry for the diagnosis and classification of acute myeloid leukaemias require double incubation and staining, using separate coupling reagents. We evaluated a method by Swirsky on our normal and abnormal blood and bone marrow smears where only a single incubation and the use of a single coupling reagent is required. Its short incubation period and i...

Evaluations of screening tests for bacteriuria have traditionally compared the test results with those of quantitative urine cultures. However, many patients with symptomatic urinary tract infections can have less than 10(5) CFU/ml in their urine. Therefore, the results of urine culture and three screening tests (Bac-T-Screen, Chemstrip LN [which tests for leukocyte esterase and nitrate reducta...

We aggregated published data from field studies documenting prevalence of Schistosoma haematobium infection and bladder pathology determined by ultrasonography or hematuria detected by reagent strip, questionnaire, or visual examination. A mathematical expression was used to describe the associations between prevalence of pathology/morbidity and infection. This allows for indirect comparison of...

OBJECTIVE The performance of automated flow cytometric urinalysis is not well described in pediatric urinary tract infection. We sought to determine the diagnostic performance of automated cell counts and emergency department point-of-care (POC) dipstick urinalyses in the evaluation of young febrile children. METHODS We prospectively identified a convenience sample of febrile pediatric emerge...

A method of testing for bacteriuria with multiple reagent strips for blood, nitrite, and leucocyte esterase was evaluated. Of 669 urine specimens tested, 267 were negative on the reagent strips and so would ordinarily be discarded, creating a reduction in the workload of culturing urine specimens of 40%. Thirteen of these were false negative results, however, which represented 10% of all the sa...