Peripheral Blood Smear: Hematologist Buddy to Catch Dangerous Budding: A Report of Two Cases.

The incidence of nosocomial infections has been reported as 12%-18% in various studies from India, with bloodstream infections amounting 15%. Fungal pathogens have become a major cause of nosocomial bloodstream infections. Detection of fungemia by blood culture often requires 2 or 3 days of incubation. Few studies have reported the detection of species (, , and ) by review of routinely stained blood smears, often days earlier than diagnosis being possible by culture. These can be seen as round-oval extracellular as well as intracellular budding yeast organisms which show pink-magenta staining with periodic acid Schiff stain. We report here the detection of spp. in the peripheral blood smear.