The incidence of rabies in Thailand reached its peak in 2018 with 18 human deaths. Preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) vaccination is thus recommended for high-risk populations. WHO has recently recommended that patients who are exposed to a suspected rabid animal and have already been immunized against rabies should receive a 1-site intradermal (ID) injection of 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMelioidosis, infection caused by Burkholderia pseudomallei, is characterized by robust innate immune responses. We have previously reported associations of TLR1 single nucleotide missense variant rs76600635 with mortality and of TLR5 nonsense variant rs5744168 with both bacteremia and mortality in single-center studies of patients with melioidosis in northeastern Thailand. The objective of this study was to externally validate the associations of rs76600635 and rs5744168 with bacteremia and mortality in a large multicenter cohort of melioidosis patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiagnosis of non-tuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) infection is difficult due to low sensitivity and time-consuming laboratory tests. Current serological assays fail in tropical countries due to high antibody background. This study aimed to investigate an appropriate method for detecting anti-glycopeptidolipid (GPL)-core antibodies to diagnose NTM infection in Thailand.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF3-Hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase inhibitor (statin) use is associated with a lower risk of incident pneumonia and, less robustly, with nonpulmonary infections. Whether statin use is associated with a lower risk of pneumonia than other clinical presentations of infection with the same pathogen is unknown. To assess whether preadmission statin use is associated with a lower risk of pneumonia than nonpneumonia presentations among patients hospitalized with infection (melioidosis).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent evidence has demonstrated that both acute and chronic exposure to particulate air pollution are risk factors for respiratory tract infections and increased mortality from sepsis. There is therefore an urgent need to establish the impact of ambient particulate matter (PM) on innate immune cells and to establish potential strategies to mitigate against adverse effects. PM has previously been reported to have potential adverse effects on neutrophil function.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Melioidosis is an often-fatal tropical infectious disease caused by the Gram-negative bacillus , but few studies have identified promising biomarker candidates to predict outcome.
Methods: In 78 prospectively enrolled patients hospitalized with melioidosis, six candidate protein biomarkers, identified from the literature, were measured in plasma at enrollment. A multi-biomarker model was developed using least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression, and mortality discrimination was compared to a clinical variable model by receiver operating characteristic curve analysis.
Background: Melioidosis is a neglected tropical infection caused by the environmental saprophyte .
Methods: We conducted a prospective, observational study at nine hospitals in northeastern Thailand, a hyperendemic melioidosis zone, to define current characteristics of melioidosis patients and quantify outcomes over one year.
Findings: 2574 individuals hospitalised with culture-confirmed melioidosis were screened and 1352 patients were analysed.
Microbiol Spectr
December 2022
Infections by Acinetobacter species are recognized as a serious global threat due to causing severe disease and their high levels of antibiotic resistance. Acinetobacter baumannii is the most prevalent pathogen in the genus, but infection by Acinetobacter nosocomialis has been reported widely. Diagnosis of patients with A.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Rep
September 2022
Zinc deficiency impairs the antibody-mediated immune response and is common in children from lower-income countries. This study aimed to investigate the impact of different zinc supplementation regimens (7, 10 or 20 mg/day elemental zinc)-therapeutic dispersible zinc tablets (TZ), daily multiple micronutrient powder (MNP), daily preventive zinc tablets (PZ) and placebo powder (control)-and compare between baseline and endline antibody production against pathogenic Escherichia coli in Laotian children (aged 6-23 months). Fifty representative plasma samples of each treatment group were randomly selected from 512 children to determine anti-E.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe complement system is required for innate immunity against , an important cause of antibiotic resistant systemic infections. strains differ in their susceptibility to the membrane attack complex (MAC) formed from terminal complement pathway proteins, but the reasons for this variation remain poorly understood. We have characterized in detail the complement sensitivity phenotypes of nine clinical strains and some of the factors that might influence differences between strains.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAntibody therapy may be an alternative treatment option for infections caused by the multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacterium As has multiple capsular serotypes, a universal antibody therapy would need to target conserved protein antigens rather than the capsular polysaccharides. We have immunized mice with single or multiple strains to induce antibody responses to protein antigens, and then assessed whether these responses provide cross-protection against a collection of genetically diverse clinical isolates. Immunized mice developed antibody responses to multiple protein antigens.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs the capacity for generating large-scale molecular profiling data continues to grow, the ability to extract meaningful biological knowledge from it remains a limitation. Here, we describe the development of a new fixed repertoire of transcriptional modules, BloodGen3, that is designed to serve as a stable reusable framework for the analysis and interpretation of blood transcriptome data. The construction of this repertoire is based on co-clustering patterns observed across sixteen immunological and physiological states encompassing 985 blood transcriptome profiles.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAntimicrob Agents Chemother
May 2023
Melioidosis is an often fatal infection in tropical regions caused by an environmental bacterium, Current recommended melioidosis treatment requires intravenous β-lactam antibiotics such as ceftazidime (CAZ), meropenem (MEM) or amoxicillin-clavulanic acid (AMC) and oral trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole. Emerging antibiotic resistance could lead to therapy failure and high mortality. We performed a prospective multicentre study in northeast Thailand during 2015-2018 to evaluate antibiotic susceptibility and characterize β-lactam resistance in clinical isolates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMelioidosis is an often lethal tropical disease caused by the Gram-negative bacillus, . The study objective was to characterize transcriptomes in melioidosis patients and identify genes associated with outcome. Whole blood RNA-seq was performed in a discovery set of 29 melioidosis patients and 3 healthy controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDetection of IgA antibody against Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) glycopeptidolipid (GPL) has recently been shown to improve the diagnosis of MAC pulmonary disease but has yet to be tested in disseminated Non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) infection. In this study, we address the diagnostic efficacies of an anti-GPL-core ELISA kit in disseminated lymphadenopathy patients positive for NTM culture and anti-IFN-γ autoantibodies. The study was conducted in a tertiary referral center in northeastern Thailand and patients with NTM, tuberculosis, melioidosis, and control subjects were enrolled.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS Negl Trop Dis
September 2020
Patients with beta-thalassaemia increase the risk of bacterial infections, particularly Burkholderia pseudomallei (Bp), the causative agent of melioidosis in Thailand. Impaired immune cell functions may be the cause of this susceptibility, but detailed mechanisms have not been defined. In this study, we observed impaired production of IFN-gamma and IL-10 by whole blood from beta-thalassaemia patients upon stimulation with a range of bacteria-derived stimuli.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe anti-interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) autoantibody is a known cause of opportunistic non-tuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) infection in adults. Diagnosis of those patients is difficult due to the low sensitivity of bacterial culture, and because detection of the neutralizing autoantibody needs special laboratory devices. We conducted a retrospective review of indirect and inhibitory ELISA, both used for detection of anti-IFN-gamma auto-antibody in 102 patients with lymphadenopathies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTuberculosis (Edinb)
July 2020
Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is an important risk factor for development of tuberculosis (TB). Our previous study showed glibenclamide, an anti-diabetic drug used to control blood glucose concentration, reduced interleukin (IL)-8 secretion from primary human monocytes challenged with M. tuberculosis (Mtb).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMelioidosis is caused by and is predominantly seen in tropical regions. The clinical signs and symptoms of the disease are nonspecific and often result in misdiagnosis, failure of treatment, and poor clinical outcome. Septicemia with septic shock is the most common cause of death, with mortality rates above 40%.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Nutr
August 2020
Background: Zinc deficiency impairs immune function and is common among children in South-East Asia.
Objectives: The effect of zinc supplementation on immune function in young Laotian children was investigated.
Methods: Children (n = 512) aged 6-23 mo received daily preventive zinc tablets (PZ; 7 mg Zn/d), daily multiple micronutrient powder (MNP; 10 mg Zn/d, 6 mg Fe/d, plus 13 other micronutrients), therapeutic dispersible zinc tablets only in association with diarrhea episodes (TZ; 20 mg Zn/d for 10 d after an episode), or daily placebo powder (control).
Sci Rep
February 2020
Diabetes mellitus (DM) patients are at an increased risk of complications following influenza-virus infection, seasonal vaccination (SV) is recommended. However, SV with trivalent influenza vaccine (TIV) can induce antibody and type-I interferon (IFN) responses, and the effect of anti-DM treatment on these responses is incompletely understood. We evaluated the antibody response and IFN-α expression in individuals with and without type 2 DM (T2DM) following SV, and examined the effects on anti-DM treatment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Trop Med Hyg
February 2020
Environmental enteric dysfunction (EED) may be ameliorated by zinc supplementation. The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of different forms of zinc supplementation on biomarkers of EED (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGerminal center (GC) B cells at viral replication sites acquire specificity to poorly immunogenic but conserved influenza hemagglutinin (HA) epitopes. Here, high-throughput epitope mapping of local GC B cells is used to identify conserved HA epitope selecting cross-reactive antibodies that mediate heterosubtypic protection. A distinct feature of this epitope is an occlusion in the naive trimeric HA structure that is exposed in the post-fusion HA structure to occur under low pH conditions during viral replication.
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