Acute SARS-CoV-2 infections are not always diagnosed; hence an unknown proportion of all infections are not documented. SARS-CoV-2 can induce spike and nucleocapsid protein specific IgG antibodies, which can be detected in seroprevalence studies to identify a previous infection. However, with the introduction of vaccines containing the spike protein it is no longer possible to use spike-IgG as a marker of infection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis comparative study aimed at qualifying a broth microdilution (BMD) assay for phenotypic drug susceptibility testing (pDST) of complex (MTBC) strains for implementation in a routine DST workflow. The assay was developed based on the EUCAST (European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing) reference protocol for determination of the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of 14 anti-tuberculous drugs (isoniazid [INH], rifampicin [RIF], ethambutol [EMB], amikacin [AMI], moxifloxacin [MFX], levofloxacin [LFX], bedaquiline [BDQ], clofazimine [CFZ], delamanid [DLM], pretomanid [PA], para-aminosalicylic acid [PAS], linezolid [LZD], ethionamide [ETH], and cycloserine [CS]). Forty MTBC strains with various drug resistance profiles were tested to determine the agreement between MIC results and genotypic drug susceptibility testing (gDST) results derived from whole-genome sequencing (WGS).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn important aspect of microbiological surveillance is the ability to access live viruses for microneutralization assays, which enables the study of viral characteristics and mechanisms in vitro and production of positive controls for diagnostic methods. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Public Health Agency of Sweden established a protocol for the rapid collection of clinical samples and subsequent isolation of novel virus variants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Linezolid treatment has a high risk of toxicity and adverse drug reactions (ADR) are frequent. Few studies have investigated risk factors of major ADRs separately, therefore, we aimed to evaluate major ADRs including peripheral neuropathy in relation to risk factors and drug concentration levels of linezolid in a high-resource setting for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB).
Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study including participants treated with a linezolid-containing MDR-TB regimen in Sweden 1992-2018.