Acute gastroenteritis is best managed using a few simple, well-defined medical interventions.

CAIV-T was well tolerated in these children with RTIs and demonstrated superior relative efficacy compared with TIV in preventing influenza illness.

Development of the guidelines was supported by a grant from GlaxoSmithKline and Merck Sharp & Dohme.Conflicts of interest of the working group members are listed at the end of the article.

In a retrospective study, 80 episodes of nontyphoid salmonella (NTS) bacteremia in children were compared with 55 episodes in adults over a 10-year period. The study disclosed major differences in the predisposition, clinical presentation, and outcome as well as the microbiology of NTS bacteremia in relation to age. Adults were more likely than children to have predisposing diseases (95% vs. 15%, respectively; P < .0001) and to receive prior medications (95% vs. 23%, respectively; P < .0001), particularly immunosuppressive agents (58% vs. 5%, respectively; P < .0001). In most adults (67%), NTS infection presented as a primary bacteremia and was associated with a high incidence of extraintestinal organ involvement (34%) and a high mortality rate (33%). In children, NTS bacteremia was usually secondary to gastroenteritis (75%) and caused no fatalities. Although group D Salmonella (78%) and the serovar Salmonella enteritidis were the predominant isolates from adults, the emergence of infections due to group C Salmonella (46%) and the serovar Salmonella virchow in children was noted.

No abstract

The chlorhexidine gluconate-impregnated sponge is safe and significantly reduces the rates of CVC colonization in infants and children after cardiac surgery.

Patients with diarrhea due to strains of enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) (e. g. O157:H7) might be at a higher risk of developing hemolytic uremic syndrome when treated with antimicrobial agents. It has been suggested that this might be due to an increase of release or production of vero or shiga-like toxin from such organisms, possibly as a stress response to antimicrobial agents. The aim of this study was to detect such increases in extracellular toxin in vitro with a newly developed method that exposed EHEC to high sublethal concentrations followed by a recovery phase at progressively lower concentrations. Five strains of EHEC were exposed to continuously changing concentrations of ciprofloxacin, co-trimoxazole, cefixime and tetracycline. The amount of free shiga-like toxin I (SLT-I) released was compared to the amount released from inocula that were not exposed to antibiotics. There were significant differences between the five EHEC strains in the amount of toxin detected after exposure to antimicrobial agents (p less than 0.001). Equally important was the type of antibiotic (p less than 0.001), with ciprofloxacin inducing the largest increase ranging from 169 to 436%, followed by co-trimoxazole, cefixime and tetracycline. In addition, the increases in free toxin correlated with the concentration of the antibiotics (p less than 0.001). The association between antibiotic-induced increases in SLT-I produced by strains of EHEC and certain classes of antibiotics might influence the analysis of future epidemiological studies on risk factors for HUS.

SF 6 in the vicinity of its critical point was used to study turbulent convection up to exceptionally high Rayleigh numbers, Ra (up to 5 3 10 14 ) and to verify for the first time the generalized scaling laws for the heat transport and the large scale circulation velocity as a function of Ra and the Prandtl number, Pr, in a very wide range of these parameters. Both scaling laws obtained are consistent with theoretical predictions by Shraiman and Siggia [Phys. Rev. A 42, 3650 (1990)].