During the course of preliminary clinical trials of an improved membrane filter blood culture system, filter plugging produced by a gelling of the lysing solution was observed when the patients had high leukocyte counts. A solution of streptokinase-streptodornase (Varidase, Lederle Laboratories) dissolved or prevented the gel and permitted rapid filtration without plugging. With streptokinase-s...

BACKGROUND In heroin injectors, there have been a number of outbreaks caused by spore-forming bacteria, causing serious infections such as anthrax or botulism. These are, most likely, caused by injecting contaminated heroin, and our aim was to develop a filter that efficiently removes these bacteria and is also likely to be acceptable for use by people who inject drugs (i.e. quick, simple and n...

We evaluated the efficiency of five membrane filters for recovery of Cryptosporidium parvum oocysts and Giardia lamblia cysts. These filters included the Pall Life Sciences Envirochek (EC) standard filtration and Envirochek high-volume (EC-HV) membrane filters, the Millipore flatbed membrane filter, the Sartorius flatbed membrane filter (SMF), and the Filta-Max (FM) depth filter. Distilled and ...

Early appropriate treatment of bacteremia is important in minimizing morbidity and mortality. Standard blood culture methods are not optimal since several days are often required for recovery and identification of organisms which may be present in the blood. The use of a membrane filter technique allows one to grow any organisms present in blood much more rapidly than by broth or pour plate cul...

A prototype composite electrode consisting of a metallized membrane "outer" cathode, and a conventional "inner" silver disc cathode, both sharing the same electrolyte, is described. Preliminary results indicate that the metallized membrane will act as an oxygen filter, allowing anaesthetic gases such as nitrous oxide, to pass through to the second (inner) cathode, where they may be reduced. Lin...

In this paper, a special preprocessing operations (filter) is proposed to decrease the effects of noise of textures. This filter using average of circular neighbor points (Cmean) to reduce noise effect. Comparing this filter with other average filters such as square mean filter and square median filter indicates that it provides more noise reduction and increases the classification accuracy...