Emerging infections: shewanella - a series of five cases.

BACKGROUND: Shewanella spp. are unusual cause of disease in humans; however, reports of Shewanella infections have been increasing. Shewanella is a ubiquitous organism that has been isolated from many foods, sewage, and both from fresh and salt water. Earlier it was named as Pseudomonas putrefaciens or Shewanella putrefaciens. There are several reports describing this organism causing human infections such as cellulitis, abscesses, bacteremia, wound infection, etc. It is oxidase and catalase-positive non-fermenter gram-negative rod that produces hydrogen sulfide. AIMS: The study was conducted to identify Shewanella spp., which was wrongly reported as Pseudomonas spp. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Clinical samples were cultured as per standard clinical laboratory procedure. We tested the non-lactose-fermenting colonies for oxidase positivity. Oxidase-positive colony was inoculated in triple sugar iron slant (TSI) to know the hydrogen sulfide production. Hydrogen sulfide positive colonies were further tested for citrate, urease, indole, and amino acid decarboxylation and acid and gas production from sugars. RESULTS: Five isolates identified as Pseudomonas spp. during preliminary testing were proved to be Shewanella spp. on further testing. CONCLUSIONS: It will help in better understanding the epidemiology, pathogenesis and risk factors associated with these and prevention of the rare pathogenic organisms.

Early diagnosis of leptospirosis by conventional methods: one-year prospective study.

Several techniques are available for the diagnosis of leptospirosis and microscopic agglutination test is considered as gold standard, but these require sophisticated techniques and instruments. This study was conducted to know the sensitivity and specificity of dark field microscopy (DFM) as compared to IgM enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in correlation with clinical diagnosis. It is a prospective study of 297 samples received from clinically suspected cases of leptospirosis for DFM and IgM ELISA. We tried to evaluate the easily available technique, DFM. We got promising results with DFM. Specificity and sensitivity were observed to be 61% and 60%, respectively, alone and 95.8% efficacy when combined with IgM ELISA. Thus, DFM should be tried for where other diagnostic tools are not easily available. It is an easy and rapid technique, which can help in the early diagnosis and management of patients.

Prevalence of infections in renal transplant recipients of north India.

Renal transplant is usually performed at the end stage of renal disease. Most of the transplant recipients become susceptible to infections due to chronic uremia, protein depletion, anemia and administration of immunosuppressive drugs. It is a retrospective study of 510 post renal transplant recipients. 378 (74%) renal transplant recipients suffered from the infections. Most common site of infection was urinary tract infection (53%). Out of 26% of wound infections, the deep wound infection (23%) was six times higher than superficial wound infection (3.5%). Chest infection and bacteraemia were noticed to be 18% and 8%, respectively. The common isolate was Escherichia coli (160) followed by Staphylococcus aureus (140), Enterococcus (86) and Pseudomonas (69).