BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Since the early 2000s, the incidence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections among the community of people lacking known healthcare risk factors has increased. This MRSA infection is referred to as community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA) infection and is distinct from hospital-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA) infection, which occurs among people with known...

The aim of this study was to assess the serum bactericidal activity (SBA) of levofloxacin compared with that of ofloxacin against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolates. Serum from 10 healthy volunteers (seven females, three males) was collected after a single oral dose of either levofloxacin (500 mg) or ofloxacin (400 mg). Subjects were allocated randomly to treatment afte...

Face analysis in a real-world environment is a complex task as it should deal with challenging problems such as pose variations, illumination changes and complex backgrounds. The use of active appearance models for facial features detection is often successful in restricted environments, but the performance decreases when applied in unconstrained environments. Therefore, in this paper, we intro...

The majority of Staphylococcus aureus infections from Isfahan, Iran, were caused by epidemic methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) lineages, sequence type 8 (ST8), ST22, ST30, and ST6. The predominant methicillin-resistant S. aureus strain was ST239. We observed a high prevalence of Panton-Valentine leukocidin-positive MSSA strains (19.7%), which is a matter of considerable concern, since th...

This study determined the performance of BD Max StaphSR and the rate of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) with an unrecognized staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec (SCCmec) right-extremity junction (MREJ) region among 907 methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) and 900 methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) isolates. The rate of mecA/mecC dropout mutants was also evaluated. ...

Sensitivity to the two anti-microtubular drugs oryzalin and EPC (ethyl-N-phenylcarbamate) is shown to be uncoupled in the rice EPC-resistant ER31d cell line, derived from the corresponding ER31 mutant. The ER31d cell line grows in the presence of EPC but it remains susceptible to oryzalin. In the presence of concentrations of EPC up to 0.4 mM, ER31d cells remain viable maintaining cell anisotro...

The activities of ertapenem (MK-0826) and eight other agents against a range of penicillin-susceptible and -resistant pneumococci were tested by determination of MICs by the microdilution method and by the time-kill methodology. For 125 penicillin-susceptible, 74 penicillin-intermediate, and 86 penicillin-resistant pneumococci, the MICs at which 50% of isolates are inhibited (MIC(50)s) and MIC(...