The "gold standard" for epidemiological typing of Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus) is the capsular reaction test (Neufeld test) with antisera against the 90 pneumococcal polysaccharide capsules, i.e., serotyping. The method is labor intensive and requires a certain level of experience to be performed satisfactory, and thus it has been restricted for use in specialized reference or resear...

Latex beads coated with anti-Cryptococcus neoformans antibody were agglutinated by serum from a bone marrow transplant recipient having a disseminated infection caused by Trichosporon beigelii. The cryptococcal latex agglutination titer in the serum of the patient rose to 1:2,560 by the time of his death. Necropsy confirmed the disseminated Trichosporon infection and absence of C. neoformans. C...

In the fields of infectious diseases, a variety of immunoassay methods has been reported. More simple, rapid and cost-effective manual tests for infectious diseases are needed. For the purpose of simple diagnosis of rotavirus infection, a rapid test against human rotavirus was developed. As for the preparation of the reagent, clinically isolated human rotavirus was cultured using MA-104 cells. ...

Leptospirosis is a febrile zoonosis of worldwide distribution. A latex agglutination assay was evaluated in two studies, the first using a panel of well-characterized sera from patients with leptospirosis and from patients with other disease states and the second, a prospective hospital-based study, evaluating sera from 186 consecutive patients admitted to hospital with acute febrile illness. T...

Up to approximately 50 mug of staphylococcal enterotoxin A per plate was produced by cellophane-over-agar cultures. Enterotoxin was determined by a latex agglutination technique.

Previously, we reported the specific occurrence of neutralizing autoantibodies against granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid from 11 Japanese patients with idiopathic pulmonary alveolar proteinosis (I-PAP). The autoantibody was also detected in sera from all 5 I-PAP patients examined. To determine that the existence of the autoantibody is ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the prevalence of rotavirus in infants and young children in Makkah, Saudi Arabia. METHODS A population-based prevalence study was done in randomly selected infants and young children suffering from acute diarrhoea. Faecal specimens were collected from 479 patients. A latex agglutination test was used for rotavirus detection. All positive and 10 negative samples for rot...