Leprosy in the twenty-first century: a microbiological, clinical, and epidemiological study in northwestern Spain.

Leprosy, or Hansen's disease, is a chronic granulomatous disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae and the recently discovered Mycobacterium lepromatosis. In Spain and other countries, where leprosy has been eliminated, an increasing number of imported cases have been documented, especially from South Africa and South America. The diagnosis of leprosy is mainly clinical, based on the signs established by the World Health Organization (WHO), although laboratory tools can be useful for diagnostic confirmation.

[Usefulness of serological studies for the early diagnosis of Lyme disease in Primary Health Care Centres].

Objective: The main aim of this study was to determine the usefulness of an early diagnosis of Lyme disease (LD) in Primary Health Care Centres (PHCC) using the ELISA test as serological screening technique.

Methods: A retrospective study (2006-2013) was performed in order to determine the anti-Borrelia seropositivity in 2,842 people at risk of having LD. The possible relationship between the environment and the area of residence with anti-Borrelia seropositivity was also studied according to the origin of the specimens (PHCC/Hospital).

A predictive model for mortality of bloodstream infections. Bedside analysis with the Weibull function.

This paper describes the construction and validation of a prognostic model for predicting post-bloodstream infection survival up to Day 21. A Weibull multiple regression model was adopted in a prospective cohort study of all patients diagnosed with true bacteremia or fungemia in a teaching hospital between 1991 and 1994 (training set, 1,577 patients). The final model included six variables easily detected in any institution: source of infection, underlying neoplasm, septic shock, community-acquired, age over 65, and polymicrobial bacteremia.