Click here for file(54K, doc)AcknowledgementsThis work has been developed by an international team pertaining to the Spanish-Canadian Consortium for the Study of Influenza Immunopathogenesis. The authors would like to thank also to the Nursery teams who kindly collected the samples. The authors would like to thank Nikki Kelvin for language revision of this article. The study was scientifically sponsored by the Spanish Society for Critical Care Medicine (SEMICYUC). Funding: MICCIN-FIS/JCYL-IECSCYL-SACYL (Spain): Programa de Investigaci��n Comisionada en Gripe, GR09/0021-EMER07/050- PI081236-RD07/0067. CIHR-NIH-Sardinia Recherch��-LKSF Canada support DJK.
Sepsis is a serious medical condition frequently found in transplant patients, in patients with hematological neoplasms or in patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) after surgery. Rapid pathogen identification and appropriate chemotherapy are important to improve patient prognoses. In the United States, more than 750,000 cases of sepsis are reported annually [1]. The fatality rate is 28% to 50% for severe sepsis and as high as 90% when the causative agent is Aspergillus [1-3]. For most cases of suspected sepsis, blood culture analysis is performed for pathogen detection, and empirical treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics is immediately started without waiting for the result of pathogen identification. This is because, in many cases, positive pathogen identification, and pathogen drug sensitivity analysis, using blood culture analysis, requires from three days to a week for common bacteria and a few weeks for fungi [4,5]. Therefore, choosing the appropriate antibiotic chemotherapy according to evidence-based medicine (EBM) is currently difficult in many sepsis cases. Moreover, in some cases, inappropriate antibiotic selection not only annuls the effects of chemotherapy but also promotes the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria.Because of these problems with sepsis diagnosis, highly sensitive sepsis-pathogen detection methods using nucleic acid amplification techniques such as PCR have been recently studied for the purpose of rapid testing and the subsequent choosing of appropriate chemotherapy. However, the development of a diagnostic reagent to simultaneously detect a wide range of sepsis pathogens has been difficult using conventional genetic technology.A new assay, termed SeptiFast (Roche Diagnostics, Mannheim, Germany), enables rapid, multiplex testing for micro-organisms using a real-time polymerase chain reaction that is coupled to melting curve analysis. This kit can identify up to 25 organisms from four different microbial groups, in a single sample, in about 4.5 hours [6].