Neutropenia and febrile neutropenia are two major complications of chemotherapy. Dose reductions, delays in treatment administration, and the use of granulocyte colony-stimulating factors are equally recommended options to preserve absolute neutrophil count in case of chemotherapy regimens bringing a risk of febrile neutropenia of 20% or higher. Recombinant granulocyte colony-stimulating factor...

Bacterial colony enumeration is an essential tool for many widely used biomedical assays. However, bacterial colony enumerating is a low throughput, time consuming and labor intensive process since there may exist hundreds or thousands of colonies on a Petri dish, and the counting process is usually manually performed by well-trained technicians. In this paper, we introduce a fully automatic ye...

Recombinant human granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (rhGCSF) has been widely and successfully used in treating childhood congenital or idiopathic neutropenia.' Recombinant human granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (rhGM-CSF) has been less commonly and, in some patients in whom it failed, rhGCSF was able to restore normal granulocyte count? We report a case with a negative respo...

Serum resistance is an important virulence marker in uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) but its pattern with respect to commensal gastrointestinal strains is less studied. We compared the serum resistance pattern of UPEC with commensal strains in stool samples from healthy individuals. A total of 40 isolates of UPEC (test) and intestinal E. coli (control) each was obtained from patients of all age gr...

Neutropenia frequently complicates infection due to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The etiology of neutropenia in this setting includes bone marrow infection or infiltration, myelosuppressive therapies, the presence of antibodies to HIV, and accelerated apoptosis. Protection against microbial invaders by neutrophils is further compromised by impaired chemotaxis and phagocytosis, production...

Hydroxyurea, a widely used cytotoxic/cytostatic agent that does not influence methylation of DNA bases, increases fetal hemoglobin production in anemic monkeys. To determine its effect in sickle cell anemia, we treated two patients with a total of four, 5-d courses (50 mg/kg per d, divided into three oral doses). With each course, fetal reticulocytes increased within 48-72 h, peaked in 7-11 d, ...

A 40% rumen fluid basal medium has been developed that without added substrate will support growth of about 10% or less of the total colony count obtained with 40% rumen fluid-glucose-cellobiose-starch-agar medium (RGCSA). The basal medium is prepared by anaerobic incubation of all ingredients in RGCSA medium except the carbohydrates, Na2CO3, and cysteine for 7 days at 38 degrees C. After incub...