AIM A formal Needle and Syringe Program (NSP) is not provided in Australian prisons. Injecting equipment circulates in prisons as part of an informal and illegal economy. This paper examined how this economy generates blood-borne virus (BBV) risk and risk mitigation opportunities for inmates. METHOD The HITS-p cohort recruited New South Wales inmates who had reported ever injecting drugs and ...

We report the first laboratory-confirmed case of Rickettsia mongolotimonae infection in Africa. The patient sought treatment for an eschar on his toe; lymphangitis, severe headaches, and fever subsequently developed. After a regimen of doxycycline, symptoms rapidly resolved. R. mongolotimonae infection was diagnosed retrospectively by serologic tests and molecular-based detection of the organis...

BACKGROUND To describe 4 patients with bilateral tonic pupils in neurosyphilis. CASES Four young men had pupillary abnormalities, which involved irregular shapes, large sizes, tonic reactions, and vermiform movements of both pupils with light-near dissociation. Cholinergic supersensitivity defined bilateral tonic pupils. OBSERVATIONS Neurosyphilis was diagnosed in these patients on the basi...

August von Wassermann was born in Bavaria just over a century ago, and perhaps it is therefore fitting to report a small group of patients in which serious diagnostic difficulties were resolved with the aid of the complement-fixation test now named after him. We also report these cases in order to draw attention to the fact that neurosyphilis, though uncommon, is not nowadays as rare as some wo...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the use of dark ground microscopy (DGM) and treponemal serological tests in the diagnosis of primary (PS) and secondary (SS) syphilis. METHODS A retrospective case note review of patients with early syphilis who attended our department between January 2001 and December 2002. Data were collected on demographics, results of treponemal serology and DGM. RESULTS 50 indivi...

Two dipstick assays for the detection of Brucella- and typhoid-specific immunoglobulin M, recently developed by the Royal Tropical Institute of The Netherlands, were evaluated by use of 85 plasma samples from Egyptian patients. Both dipsticks were simple and accurate rapid diagnostic assays, and they can be useful adjuncts for the diagnosis of typhoid fever and brucellosis.

Thailand is a nonendemic area of echinococcosis. We report, herein, 3 cases with a special note on the use of serology in detection of the disease in one family. All cases were Thais. The first case was a man, having a cystic mass in the liver. He was subsequently diagnosed as having echinococcosis following positive serology. The second case, a male, had a renal hydatid cyst revealed by histop...

Chagas disease (CD) is a systemic parasitic infection caused by the flagellated form of Trypanosoma cruzi. Córdoba department, located in the Colombian Caribbean Coast, was not considered as a region at risk of T. cruzi transmission. In this article, we describe the first acute CD case in Salitral village in Sahagún, Córdoba, confirmed by microscopy and serological tests. Our results draw atten...

HIV infection is continuously raising, and different treatments did not manage to extend the patient's life. Clinical and morphopathological features of respiratory, gastrointestinal, hematological and nervous system are well characterized in HIV infection, but cardiac involvement is not so well known. Cardiac involvement is extremely rare in HIV disease, but demonstrated by echocardiography an...

OBJECTIVES The 2006 revised criteria for antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) provide a new classification challenge, and studies validating the updated criteria against the older ones are still scanty. We compared the 1999 preliminary with the 2006 revised classification criteria for APS, and evaluated if the revised criteria provide an added value over the original ones. METHODS A laboratory-bas...