BACKGROUND Neisseria meningitidis (N. meningitidis) remains the leading worldwide cause of acute bacterial meningitis and fatal sepsis in healthy individuals. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 12 cases of N. meningitidis from patients with invasive meningococcal infections in University of Malaya Medical Centre, Kuala Lumpur during the years 1987-2004 were reviewed together with details of age...

Nasopharyngeal swabbing substantially underestimates carriage of Neisseria meningitidis. Real-time PCR assays were employed to examine the presence of a broad range of bacteria and of N. meningitidis groups B and C, respectively, in tonsils from 26 individuals from Oxford, England, and 72 individuals from Zurich, Switzerland. The detection limit of each PCR system was DNA from one bacterial cel...

Neisseria meningitidis is a human exclusive pathogen that can lead to invasive meningococcal disease or may be carried in the upper respiratory tract without symptoms. The relationship between carriage and disease remains poorly understood but it is widely accepted that decreasing carriage by immunization should lead to a reduction of invasive cases. Latin America has experienced an increased i...

Serogroup W Neisseria meningitidis was the main cause of invasive meningococcal disease in Chile during 2012. The case-fatality rate for this disease was higher than in previous years. Genotyping of meningococci isolated from case-patients identified the hypervirulent lineage W:P1.5,2:ST-11, which contained allele 22 of the fHbp gene.

In Western Australia, Neisseria meningitidis serogroup W clonal complex 11 became the predominant cause of invasive meningococcal disease in 2016. We used core-genome analysis to show emergence of a penicillin-resistant clade that had the penA_253 allele. This new penicillin-resistant clade might affect treatment regimens for this disease.

Since routine meningococcal C conjugate vaccination was introduced into Canada in 2002, there have been a large regional variation in the routine programs, changes to the timing of the infant series in some provinces, and wide differences in catch-up programs. As immunization is viewed as a provincial responsibility, less attention has been paid to determining national coverage rates and the di...

We present an extension of the non-parametric edge-corrected Ohser-type kernel estimator for spatio-temporal product density function. derive mean and variance give a closed-form approximation Poisson point process. Asymptotic properties this second-order characteristic are derived, using approach based on martingale theory. Taking advantage convergence to normality, confidence surfaces under ho...

A comprehensive meningococcal vaccine is yet to be developed. In the absence of a vaccine that immunizes against the serogroup B capsular polysaccharide, this can only be achieved by targeting subcapsular antigens, and a number of outer-membrane proteins (OMPs) are under consideration as candidates. A major obstacle to the development of such a vaccine is the antigenic diversity of these OMPs, ...

BACKGROUND Invasive meningococcal disease is a significant cause of mortality and morbidity in the UK. Administration of chemoprophylaxis to close contacts reduces the risk of a secondary case. However, unnecessary chemoprophylaxis may be associated with adverse reactions, increased antibiotic resistance and removal of organisms, such as Neisseria lactamica, which help to protect against mening...