BACKGROUND Although severe malaria is an important cause of mortality among children in Burkina Faso, data on community-acquired invasive bacterial infections (IBI, bacteremia and meningitis) are lacking, as well as data on the involved pathogens and their antibiotic resistance rates. METHODS The present study was conducted in a rural hospital and health center in Burkina Faso, in a seasonal ...

There is growing pressure to demonstrate the value of practice guidelines. We have reviewed the evidence that guidelines for the treatment of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) change current practices and that the standardization of practices reduces costs and/or improves outcome. The most obvious barrier to implementation of the guidelines is lack of knowledge about their content; equally imp...

BACKGROUND To delineate the epidemiologic trend, clinical characteristics and therapeutic outcomes of bacterial meningitis in young adults in Southern Taiwan. PATIENTS AND METHODS Over a period of 18 years, 329 cases of culture-proven adult bacterial meningitis were identified at our hospital. Among these 329 cases, 62 were identified as young adults (< or = 40 years) and their clinical featu...

INTRODUCTION Bacterial meningitis among critically ill adult patients remains associated with both high mortality and frequent, persistent disability. Vancomycin was added to treatment with a third-generation cephalosporin as recommended by French national guidelines. Because animal model studies had suggested interest in the use of rifampin for treatment of bacterial meningitis, and after the ...

INTRODUCTION This case report describes an extremely rare combination of paroxysmal autonomic instability with dystonia and tuberculous meningitis. Paroxysmal autonomic instability with dystonia is normally associated with severe traumatic brain injury. CASE PRESENTATION A 69-year-old man of Indonesian descent was initially suspected of having a community-acquired pneumonia, which was seen on...

INTRODUCTION Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is not considered a professional disease, and the effect of different occupations and working conditions on susceptibility to CAP is unknown. The aim of this study is to determine whether different jobs and certain working conditions are risk factors for CAP. METHODOLOGY Over a 1-year period, all radiologically confirmed cases of CAP (n=1,336) a...

INTRODUCTION Accurate etiological diagnosis of meningitis is important, but difficult in resource-limited settings due to prior administration of antibiotics and lack of viral diagnostics. We aimed to develop and validate 2 real-time multiplex PCR (RT-PCR) assays for the detection of common causes of community-acquired bacterial and viral meningitis in South African children. METHODS We devel...

OBJECTIVE Cases and controls should be chosen from the same base population to reduce selection bias in case-control studies. For hospital cases, we examined how inferences drawn from a case-control study can differ by choice of hospital- vs. community-based controls. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTINGS We used data from a case-control study that assessed risk factors for community-acquired pneumonia (...