Rapid and fully automated bacterial pathogen detection on a centrifugal-microfluidic LabDisk using highly sensitive nested PCR with integrated sample preparation.

Diagnosis of infectious diseases suffers from long turnaround times for gold standard culture-based identification of bacterial pathogens, therefore impeding timely specific antimicrobial treatment based on laboratory evidence. Rapid molecular diagnostics-based technologies enable detection of microorganisms within hours however cumbersome workflows and complex equipment still prevent their widespread use in the routine clinical microbiology setting. We developed a centrifugal-microfluidic "LabDisk" system for rapid and highly-sensitive pathogen detection on a point-of-care analyser. The unit-use LabDisk with pre-stored reagents features fully automated and integrated DNA extraction, consensus multiplex PCR pre-amplification and geometrically-multiplexed species-specific real-time PCR. Processing merely requires loading of the sample and DNA extraction reagents with minimal hands-on time of approximately 5 min. We demonstrate detection of as few as 3 colony-forming-units (cfu) of Staphylococcus warneri, 200 cfu of Streptococcus agalactiae, 5 cfu of Escherichia coli and 2 cfu of Haemophilus influenzae in a 200 µL serum sample. The turnaround time of the complete analysis from "sample-to-result" was 3 h and 45 min. The LabDisk consequently provides an easy-to-use molecular diagnostic platform for rapid and highly-sensitive detection of bacterial pathogens without requiring major hands-on time and complex laboratory instrumentation.

Physician advice and tobacco use: a survey of 1st-year college students.

First-year college students were surveyed by telephone to determine their current level of tobacco use and find out what advice they had previously received from physicians regarding tobacco products. Current tobacco use reported in this 1st-year population was 19% in men and 17% in women. Although 99.6% of the students reported having had a medical visit within the last 5 years and 89% reported a visit within the past 12 months, only 26% remembered being asked at the last visit about their use of tobacco. Women were significantly more likely than men to have been asked about tobacco (31% compared with 21%), perhaps because of oral contraceptive counseling and the women's medical history. It appeared that healthcare providers are not fully using the opportunities available to them to educate young adults about using tobacco.