A 40-year-old female patient developed toxic shock syndrome following breast surgery. A toxin producing strain of Staphylococcus aureus was isolated from the post-operative wound. INTRODUCTION The term toxic shock syndrome (TSS) was first used in 1978 1 to describe a condition characterised by sudden onset of fever, shock, confusion, subcutaneous oedema, erythematous rash which desquamates in c...

Group A streptococcus (Streptococcus pyogenes) may cause a variety of illnesses ranging from very common, usually clinically mild conditions such as pharyngitis and impetigo to less common severe infections including septicaemia [1]. With the resurgence of serious forms of group A streptococcal infection noted in many parts of the world, cases of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS) have b...

We present a case of a 27-year-old para 2þ 0 who had a normal delivery 2 years previously. She had a previous cone biopsy for CIN3 and was receiving annual smears. She was referred by her GP to our A&E department with a 24 h history of generally feeling unwell, with diarrhoea, vomiting and lower abdominal pain. Her temperature was 388C; she was hypotensive (blood pressure 72/ 38 mmHg), with a r...

have been implicated with streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS). We analyzed 19 acute-phase serum samples for mitogenic activity from patients with severe strepto-coccal disease. The serum samples from two patients in the acute phase of STSS showed strong proliferative activity. Streptococcal mitogenic exotoxin (SME) Z-1 and strep-tococcal pyrogenic exotoxin (SPE)-J were identified in one p...

We study a general equilibrium model with a housing market to understand the role of credit access among borrowers and show that an adverse financial shock can increase the asymmetry in the housing wealth distribution of subprime and prime borrowers. Households with better credit access can take advantage of the low housing prices during recessions, especially when the subprimers are previously...

INTRODUCTION Circulating strains of Staphylococcus aureus (SA) have changed in the last 30 years including the emergence of community-associated methicillin-resistant SA (MRSA). A report suggested staphylococcal toxic shock syndrome (TSS) was increasing over 2000-2003. The last population-based assessment of TSS was 1986. METHODS Population-based active surveillance for TSS meeting the CDC de...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are widespread in ecology and conservation biology, but their accuracy can be lowered by non-environmental (noisy) absences that are common in species occurrence data. Here we propose an iterative ensemble modelling (IEM) method to deal with noisy absences and hence improve the predictive reliability of ensemble modelling of species distributions. In the IEM a...