The Carba NP test was evaluated against a panel of 244 carbapenemase- and non-carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates. We confirmed the 100% specificity and positive predictive value of the test, but the sensitivity and negative predictive value were 72.5% and 69.2%, respectively, and increased to 80% and 77.3%, respectively, using a more concentrated bact...

In an outbreak setting, we screened 16,296 samples from 3,644 patients by PCR for the presence of blaOXA-48, blaVIM, blaIMP, blaNDM, and blaKPC. The blaOXA-48 gene was found in samples from 43 patients infected with 9 different species of Enterobacteriaceae. Five patients had Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates containing blaVIM. The negative predictive value of screening was 100%, and the positive...

The question "Has your child ever had wheezing or whistling in the chest at any time in the past?" is a simple and widely used proxy measure for the lifetime prevalence of asthma. Our aim was to test its validity in a longitudinal survey, comparing retrospective recall with prospective assessment of lifetime prevalence. A population-based cohort of 1,422 children, surveyed twice previously, was...

OBJECTIVE This study examined the accuracy of new wheelchair user predictions about their future wheelchair use. DESIGN This was a prospective cohort study of 84 community-dwelling veterans provided a new manual wheelchair. RESULTS The association between predicted and actual wheelchair use was strong at 3 mos (ϕ coefficient = 0.56), with 90% of those who anticipated using the wheelchair at...

OBJECTIVE To explore how formative OSCEs influence student performance and perception when undertaking summative OSCEs. METHODS We introduced formative OSCEs for second-year medical students at a large London medical school. Examination data from both formative and subsequent summative OSCEs were analysed to determine the effect on summative OSCE performance. We gathered student perceptions u...

Risk management, done well, should be inherently precautionary. Adopting an appropriate degree of precaution with respect to feared health and environmental hazards is fundamental to risk management. The real problem is in deciding how precautionary to be in the face of inevitable uncertainties, demanding that we understand the equally inevitable false positives and false negatives from screeni...

BACKGROUND This study investigated the relationship between depressive symptom response during tryptophan depletion and future depressive episodes. METHODS Twelve subjects with prior major depressive episodes in remission and medication-free for > or =3 months (patients), and 12 matched healthy (control) subjects received two tryptophan depletion tests 1 week apart. During follow-up the Hamil...

This study was performed to assess the efficiency of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) directly from sputum for the diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis by comparison between HIV-positive and HIV-negative individuals. Sputum samples were collected from hospitalized patients admitted with a clinical diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis, and subjected to smear microscopy, culture on LJ medium and det...