The pathogenesis of Staphylococcus aureus infections is influenced by multiple virulence factors that are expressed under variable conditions, and this has complicated the design of an effective vaccine. Clinical trials that targeted the capsule or clumping factor A (ClfA) failed to protect the recipients against staphylococcal infections. We passively immunized lactating mice with rabbit antib...

Until recently, physician–historians of pediatrics have generally assumed that “pediatrics as a specialized branch of medicine had no real existence before the middle of the nineteenth century.”1 This may be true if we equate pediatrics with professional organizations and specialized children’s hospitals.2,3 But as a body of knowledge and practices addressing the sick child, pediatrics has a mu...

McGrath (2005/this issue) has published a very significant article; it is significant because it examines the substantive issue of construct validity in a simple and informative way, noting the confusions apparent in how constructs and their variables are defined, used, and interpreted within the domain of personality and individual differences. This is a careful, thoughtful, article that quiet...

Streptococcus pneumoniae, an inhabitant of the upper respiratory mucosa, causes respiratory and invasive infections as well as conjunctivitis. Strains that lack the capsule, a main virulence factor and the target of current vaccines, are often isolated from conjunctivitis cases. Here we perform a comparative genomic analysis of 271 strains of conjunctivitis-causing S. pneumoniae from 72 postal ...

To define mechanisms by which polysaccharide capsules confer enhanced virulence on gram-negative bacteria, we examined the effect of the Escherichia coli capsule on complement fixation to the bacterial surface and on phagocytosis and killing of these bacteria by mouse macrophages and human polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMN) and monocytes. When E. coli were attached to mouse macrophages with con...