Background and Purpose: The presence of Candida yeasts in urine, known as candiduria, is an indicator of infection or colonization of the urinary tract by Candida species. This condition in diabetic patients can be hazardous due to diminished immune system response. The objective of this study was to investigate the incidence of candiduria in diabetic patients and to identify its causative agen...

The high sensitivity of nucleic acid amplification tests such as ligase chain reaction (LCR) has the potential to simplify specimen collection for the microbiologic diagnosis of gonorrhea. We screened first-void urine specimens from 283 women attending a Birmingham, Ala., sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinic by using LCR and compared the results to those of cervical and urethral cultures f...

BACKGROUND Urinary tract infection (UTI) is a widespread infectious disease in humans. Urine culture, a huge workload in the microbiology laboratory, is still the standard diagnostic test for UTI, but most of the cultures are negative. A reliable screening method could reduce unnecessary cultures and quicken reporting of negative results. METHODS We evaluated the usefulness of a flow cytometr...

Kemp RB. Effect of the removal of cell surface sialic acid on aggregation in vitro. Nature 1968;218: 1255. 8Steinhardt RA, Lundin L, Mazia D. Bioelectric responses of the echinoderm egg to fertilisation. Proc Natl Acad Sci 1971;68:2426-30. 9 Macieira-Coelho A, Avrameas S. Modulation of cell behaviour in vitro by the substratum in fibroblastic and leukaemic mouse cell lines. Proc Natl Acad Sci 1...

Microbiology laboratories continually strive to streamline and improve their urine culture algorithms because of the high volumes of urine specimens they receive and the modest numbers of those specimens that are ultimately considered clinically significant. In the current study, we quantitatively measured the impact of the introduction of CHROMagar Orientation (CO) medium into routine use in t...

One hundred and fifty-eight anaerobic organisms from 147 patients were isolated from 15,250 consecutive clean mid-stream or catheter urine specimens. The pathogenicity of the anaerobic genera commonly isolated from urine is reviewed and discussed. Failure to establish anaerobic isolates as pathogens and a paucity of reported cases proving anaerobic bacteria as significant causes of urinary trac...

An audit to assess the appropriateness of catheter urine culture requests was carried out for a period of one month. The requests were followed up by members of the Infection Control Team at ward level. The laboratory report had no impact on the removal of the catheter in asymptomatic or symptomatic patients, although the reports did aid antibiotic prescribing in symptomatic patients.

In the March 2001 issue of the Ceylon Medical Journal (Vol. 46 No.l), an advertisement titled "Preven­ tion is better than cure" inserted by New Delmon Hospital has misleading information. It says "Influenza vaccine 3,5 and 7 months'. Presumably it refers to the Haemophilus influenzae type B (or Hib) vaccine, which is totally different to the influenza vaccine, which is also available in Sri La...

BACKGROUND Urinalysis testing is frequently ordered in the emergency department (ED), but contamination of urine specimens limits the interpretation of results. The mid-stream, clean-catch (MSCC) procedure for urine specimen collection is recommended to decrease contamination rates, but without instructions this procedure has poor compliance. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of written...

A simple drop method for quantitative urine culture was developed and tested in comparison with standard methods for bacterial urinary counts. In a group of 452 urines all yielding Escherichia coli, 74 showed counts of more than 100,000 colonies, and 16 showed counts between 10,000 and 100,000 colonies per ml. Of these 90 urines, 3 of the 16 in the doubtful group were false negative with the dr...