Drug-Resistant Leishmania tropica Parasites Detected in Iranian Cutaneous Leishmaniasis 英文参考文献.docVIP

Synopses of Research Articles Streptococcus suis Outbreak with Symptoms of Toxic Shock Syndrome in China DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0030218 Streptococcus suis is a pathogen with serious economic effects on the pig industry worldwide. The disease is endemic in adult pigs in most countries where pig farming is common. Infections in adult pigs are usually asymptomatic, but infant piglets that get infected through contact with colonized adult females can develop fatal sepsis. Transmission to humans is rare and generally restricted to individuals with occupational exposure to live or dead pigs. The ?rst human case of S. suis infection was reported in Denmark in 1968. Most of the approximately 200 previously reported human cases were characterized by meningitis and septicemia, and associated with a mortality of less than 10%. Now George Gao and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and other Chinese institutions report details of a recent unusual outbreak in 2005 of S. suis that affected over 200 individuals in Sichuan province and killed 38 of them. Besides the large number of individuals infected and the high mortality rate, it was the clinical symptoms associated with this outbreak that attracted interest and worry from scientists and health of?cials worldwide when the outbreak was ?rst reported in the news last year. As Gao and colleagues now detail in their article, a large proportion of the individuals infected (including all but one of the patients who died) showed symptoms of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS). Up to now, most reported cases of STSS had been attributed to group A streptococci. However, as Gao and colleagues show, the etiologic agents in the recent outbreak, as well as in an earlier outbreak in Sichuan province in 1998 that killed 14 of 25 reported patients, were clearly of the serotype 2 strains of S. suis. Both human outbreaks were closely linked to outbreaks in the local