Viable Bordetella pertussis isolates are essential for surveillance purposes. We performed culture of 223 PCR-positive nasopharyngeal samples. B. pertussis was recovered from 45 (20.2%) of the samples. Growth was associated with a high bacterial load, as determined by PCR. Culture from PCR-positive samples is a feasible approach to recover B. pertussis isolates, and culture can be limited to sa...

RATIONALE Airway inflammation persists after smoking cessation in established chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), suggesting that other factors drive the airway inflammatory response. OBJECTIVES We tested the hypothesis that high levels of bacterial colonization are associated with increased levels of neutrophilic airway inflammation in stable COPD by examining the cross-sectional r...

Our previous studies indicate that the majority of in vitro monocyte/macrophage activation exhibited by extracts of Echinacea depends on bacterial components. In the present study, total bacterial load was determined within E. purpurea samples and ranged from 6.4 × 10(6) to 3.3 × 10(8) bacteria/g of dry plant material. To estimate total bacterial load, we developed a PCR-based quantification me...

BACKGROUND Nasal colonisation with otitis media (OM) pathogens, particularly Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae and Moraxella catarrhalis, is a precursor to the onset of OM. Many children experience asymptomatic nasal carriage of these pathogens whereas others will progress to otitis media with effusion (OME) or suppurative OM. We observed a disparity in the prevalence of suppurat...

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis is an infection that requires at least 6 months of chemotherapy in order to clear the bacteria from the patient's lungs. Usually, therapeutic monitoring is dependent on smear microscopy where a decline in acid-fast bacilli is observed. However, this might not be indicative of the actual decline of bacterial load and thus other tools such as culture and molecular assays a...

OBJECTIVE Bacterial meningitis in sub-Saharan Africa is predominantly caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, is often associated with HIV co-infection and mortality rates are double those seen in better resourced settings. METHODS To investigate the cause of this excessive mortality we quantified the pneumococcal DNA load and six common pro-inflammatory cytokines in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)...

Traditional diagnostic assays for Helicobacter pylori detection have their limitations. Molecular methods can improve both diagnosis and understanding of gastric diseases. Here we describe an in-house quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (q-rt-PCR) for the detection of H. pylori in gastric biopsies which has been developed and has a detection limit of 10 copies, the specificity of w...

OBJECTIVE To monitor the bacterial load in newborns with proven infections on the day of admission, 48 h and 7 days after treatment. METHODS Real-time PCR (qPCR) targeting the 16S rDNA. RESULTS The study recruited 17 newborns and the bacterial load was in general low (<50 CFU/mL). In three of four deaths, the bacterial load values increased, and in 11 of the 13 survivors the values decrease...

AIM The present investigation was conducted to locate the critical sources of bacterial contamination and to evaluate the standard sanitation protocol so as to improve the hygienic conditions during collection, evaluation, and processing of bull semen in the Semen Station. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study compared two different hygienic procedures during the collection, evaluation and processi...

The mosquito midgut microbiota has been shown to influence vector competence for multiple human pathogens. The microbiota is highly variable in the field, and the sources of this variability are not well understood, which limits our ability to understand or predict its effects on pathogen transmission. In this work, we report significant variation in female adult midgut bacterial load between s...