Communicable diseases continue to account for an unduly high proportion of the health budgets of developing countries. According to The world health report, acute diarrhoea is responsible for as many as 2.2 million deaths annually. Acute respiratory infections (primarily pneumonia) are another important cause of death, resulting in an estimated 4 million deaths each year.
Analysis of data on lung aspirates appears to indicate that, in developing countries, bacteria such as Haemophilus inﬂuenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae, rather than viruses,are the predominant pathogens in childhood pneumonia. b-Lactamase-producing H. inﬂuenzae and S. pneumoniae with decreased sensitivity to benzylpenicillin have appeared in different parts of the world, making the surveillance of these pathogens increasingly important.
Sexually transmitted diseases are on the increase. There are still threats of epidemics and pandemics of viral or bacterial origin, made more likely by inadequate epidemiological surveillance and deﬁcient preventive measures. To prevent and control the main bacterial diseases, there is a need to develop simple tools for use in epidemiological surveillance and disease monitoring, as well as simpliﬁed and reliable diagnostic techniques.
To meet the challenge that this situation represents, the health laboratory services must be based on a network of laboratories carrying out microbiological diagnostic work for health centres, hospital doctors, and epidemiologists.
The complexity of the work will increase from the peripheral to the intermediate and central laboratories. Only in this way will it be possible to gather, quickly enough, sufﬁcient relevant information to improve surveillance, and permit the early recognition of epidemics or unusual infections and the development, application, and evaluation of speciﬁc intervention measures.
This book is a an encompassing guide to basic lab procedures in clinical bacteriology. Included is everything you ever needed to know about bacteriology.
- Internal quality control
- External quality assessment
- Bacteriological investigations
- When and where bacteraemia may occur
- Blood collection
- Blood-culture media
- Processing of blood cultures
- Cerebrospinal ﬂuid