Where have the enteric viruses gone? - Differential effects on frequent causes of infectious diarrhoea by SARS-CoV-2 pandemic lockdown measures.

Background: Measures of distancing, wearing face/medical masks and lockdown introduced in many countries to meet the challenges of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic have led to gross changes in the epidemiology of important infections. The observation of decline of positive norovirus tests after introduction of lockdown in Germany led us to investigate changes in the detection of major causes of diarrhoea by comparing pre-pandemic quarters (PPQ: 1Q/17 through 1Q/20) since 2017 and pandemic quarters (PQ: 2Q/20 through 1Q/21).

Methods And Setting: Bioscientia Laboratory Ingelheim is a large regional clinical pathology laboratory serving > 50 hospitals and > 5000 general practitioners and specialist outpatient practices located in the federal states Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Evaluation of a novel immunochromatographic lateral flow assay for rapid detection of OXA-48, NDM, KPC and VIM carbapenemases in multidrug-resistant Enterobacteriaceae.

Purpose: The global spread and increasing clinical impact of carbapenemase-producing bacteria are alarming. Rapid diagnostic techniques for carbapenemase detection are of the utmost importance to prevent delays in efficient antibiotic therapy and the control of spread in hospitals. Recently, multiplex immunochromatographic lateral flow tests (ICTs) for the fast detection of carbapenemase-producers have become commercially available.

Comparison of two commercial carbapenemase gene confirmatory assays in multiresistant Enterobacteriaceae and Acinetobacter baumannii-complex.

Multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacilli (MDR-GNB) producing carbapenemases are increasing at an alarming speed. Rapid confirmation of carbapenemase type will be an important diagnostic step in clinical microbiology laboratories not only to reduce the risk of transmissions but also for optimising antibiotic therapy in the future. We compared diagnostic reliability of two commercially available molecular assays (Check-Direct CPE vs.

VanD-type vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium and Enterococcus faecalis.

Enterococcus faecium clinical isolates A902 and BM4538, which were resistant to relatively high levels of vancomycin (128 and 64 microg/ml, respectively) and to low levels of teicoplanin (4 microg/ml), and Enterococcus faecalis clinical isolates BM4539 and BM4540, which were resistant to moderate levels of vancomycin (16 microg/ml) and susceptible to teicoplanin (0.25 microg/ml), were studied. They were constitutively resistant by synthesis of peptidoglycan precursors ending with d-alanyl-d-lactate and harbored a chromosomal vanD gene cluster which was not transferable by conjugation to other enterococci.

Evaluation of the OSIRIS video reader as an automated measurement system for the agar disk diffusion technique.

Measurement of inhibition zones by the automated OSIRIS system was compared with manual measurement. In total, 14 176 measurements were made with 352 staphylococcal and 80 Enterobacteriaceae isolates, involving four panels of antibiotics on round and square Mueller-Hinton agar plates, according to the German DIN 58940 recommendations. Variations of +/- 3 mm in zone size measurements were defined as tolerable.