Publications by authors named "Ben Howden"

The bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus is ubiquitous in tropical and temperate waters throughout the world and causes infections in humans resulting from water exposure and from ingestion of contaminated raw or undercooked seafood, such as oysters. We describe a nationwide outbreak of enteric infections caused by Vibrio parahaemolyticus in Australia during September 2021-January 2022. A total of 268 persons were linked with the outbreak, 97% of whom reported consuming Australia-grown oysters.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: We undertook an integrated analysis of genomic and epidemiological data to investigate a large health-care-associated outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and to better understand the epidemiology of COVID-19 cases in Tasmania, Australia.

Methods: Epidemiological data collected on COVID-19 cases notified in Tasmania between 2 March and 15 May 2020, and positive samples of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) or RNA extracted from the samples were included. Sequencing was conducted by tiled amplicon polymerase chain reaction with ARTIC v1 or v3 primers and Illumina sequencing.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) coordinates the Global Invasive Bacterial Vaccine-Preventable Diseases (IB-VPD) Surveillance Network to support vaccine introduction decisions and use. The network was established to strengthen surveillance and laboratory confirmation of meningitis caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, and Neisseria meningitidis.

Methods: Sentinel hospitals report cases of children <5 years of age hospitalized for suspected meningitis.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The genus contains >50 human pathogenic species that cause a range of illnesses from skin and soft tissue infections to lung and brain infections. However, despite their membership in the most prominent family of secondary metabolite producers (the Actinomycetes), the ability of species, especially those that cause human infections, to produce secondary metabolites has not been as well studied. Using genome mining, we have investigated cryptic secondary metabolite biosynthesis gene clusters from species and identified a conserved locus within human pathogenic strains of and .

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: To help inform screening guidelines, we estimated the proportion of asymptomatic men who have sex with men (MSM) with oropharyngeal chlamydia.

Study Design: An audit of asymptomatic MSM attending a sexual health service from March 2015 to April 2016 was conducted. They each had an oropharyngeal swab that was tested for Chlamydia trachomatis by transcription-mediated nucleic acid amplification.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Treatment for rectal lymphogranuloma venereum where doxycycline 100 mg twice daily for 21 days was used-either alone or together with azithromycin 1 g single dose-resulted in microbiological cure of 97%. These data support doxycycline 100 mg twice daily for 21 days as the preferred treatment for rectal lymphogranuloma venereum.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: fopen(/var/lib/php/sessions/ci_sessionc7fbp8ga3q39nqepcubuuh83n6i30cte): Failed to open stream: No space left on device

Filename: drivers/Session_files_driver.php

Line Number: 177

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: session_start(): Failed to read session data: user (path: /var/lib/php/sessions)

Filename: Session/Session.php

Line Number: 137

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once