This article discusses the key clinical aspects of empiric therapy of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). Antibiotic selection, severity of CAP, single vs multiple pathogens, pharmacokinetic considerations, antibiotic resistance, i.v. vs oral antibiotic therapy for CAP, oral therapy for non-ICU hospitalized patients with CAP, beta-lactams, macrolides, ketolides, doxycycline, respiratory quinolo...

This article describes the Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis clustering of the predominant Salmonella strains (Salmonella ser. Albany, Salmonella ser. Brancaster, and Salmonella ser. Corvallis) isolated from poultry and processing environment in wet market and small-scale processing plant in Penang and Perlis, the northern states of Malaysia. Agar disk diffusion assay was performed to determine ...

A long-term programme of surveillance of antimicrobial resistance in Neisseria gonorrhoeae isolated in the World Health Organization's Western Pacific Region Gonococcal Antimicrobial Surveillance Programme ((WHO WPR GASP) continued in 1999. Over 10,000 gonococci were examined in 18 focal centres. Resistance to the quinolones and penicillins was already high in many parts of the Western Pacific ...

The uptakes of norfloxacin by quinolone-resistant and -susceptible strains of Serratia marcescens were almost the same and 50% inhibitory concentrations for DNA gyrase and the MICs of quinolones were correlated, suggesting that DNA gyrase alterations are the basis of quinolone resistance.

We conducted a national survey of antimicrobial resistance in human clinical isolates of Salmonella between July 1, 1994, and June 30, 1995. Every tenth nontyphoidal Salmonella isolate received at state public health laboratories in the United States during this period was tested for resistance to 12 antimicrobial agents, including two quinolones, nalidixic acid, and ciprofloxacin. Emerging qui...

Topoisomerase IV, a C(2)E(2) tetramer, is involved in the topological changes of DNA during replication. This enzyme is the target of antibacterial compounds, such as the coumarins, which target the ATP binding site in the ParE subunit, and the quinolones, which bind, outside the active site, to the quinolone resistance-determining region (QRDR). After site-directed and random mutagenesis, we f...

Introduction Campylobacter, especially C. jejuni, is one of the most common bacterial causes of diarrhoeal illness in humans (1). Feierl et al. (2) reported 3,771 cases of illness caused by C. jejuni in Austria in 2003, corresponding to an incidence of 46.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. The resistance of Campylobacter to quinolones is increasingly limiting their therapeutic use. The rise in human in...

Widespread fluoroquinolone resistance has drawn attention to quinazolinediones (diones), fluoroquinolone-like topoisomerase poisons that are unaffected by common quinolone-resistance mutations. To better understand differences between quinolones and diones, we examined their impact on the formation of cleaved complexes (drug-topoisomerase-DNA complexes in which the DNA moiety is broken) with gy...