Eosinophilic meningitis outbreak related to religious practice.

Three patients with eosinophilic meningitis (EoM) were investigated in two hospitals in Porto Alegre, Southern Brazil. These patients had a common exposure after the ingestion of raw mollusks in a religious ritual. Two of them had an uncommon presentation with intense lower distal extremities pain and small fiber neuropathy as defined by an electroneuromyography (ENMG) study.

The worst is yet to come: probable sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in a well-controlled HIV patient.

We describe a case of probable sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the setting of well-controlled HIV and discuss whether exist, in fact, HIV-related factors that may predispose to the development of prion disease. To the best of our knowledge, this is the third report of this association.

Morphologic evaluation of the fetal recurrent laryngeal nerve and motor units in the thyroarytenoid muscle.

This study is a morphologic description of the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) and of the number and size of motor units (MUs) in the thyroarytenoid (TA) muscle bilaterally of a human fetus aged 25 weeks. A quantitative analysis of RLN and MUs is presented to investigate similarities with equivalent structures in adults. In the fetus used in our study, the morphologic organization of the RLN was similar to that commonly described in the adult RLN.

Morphology of fetal vocal fold and associated structures.

This study is the first detailed qualitative morphologic description of the vocal fold and its associated structures (false vocal fold, larynx ventricle, epithelium, mucous glands, blood vessels, and vocal ligament) of a human fetus aged 25 weeks. In addition, a quantitative analysis of thyroarytenoid (TA) muscle fiber orientation is presented to investigate similarities with adult TA. Histologic cross sections from the vocal fold and the anterior, middle, and posterior regions of the TA muscle were examined bilaterally, and both qualitative and quantitative analyses show that the vocal fold and most of the associated structures are completely established in the studied sample.