疾病及处理

Microorganisms or microbial products have been shown to induce or protect cells from activation-induced cell death or apoptosis (1–3). Induction of apoptosis by some bacterial invaders, like shigella, might aid in spread of the organism (4), whereas inhibition of apoptosis by other micro ...

It is recognized that improvement in the practice of clinical medicine, including confirmation of the safety and efficacy of some current interventions, depends greatly on the pursuit of appropriate research. It therefore follows that improved clinical care of children depends on th ...

Neisseria meningitidis is a human specific pathogen and resides primarily in the nasopharynx of its host. The molecular-recognition mechanisms that operate at the host-microbe interface to impart such precise host/tissue specificity are not fully defined. Given the host muco-cil ...

This chapter will describe the use of organ cultures of human nasopharyngeal mucosa to study the interaction of Neisseria meningitidis with this complex tissue. Colonization of nasopharyngeal mucosa is the first step in the pathogenesis of meningococcal disease. Supporting evide ...

The vascular endothelium forms an essential barrier against invasion by Neisseria meningitidis from the nasopharynx into the circulation and against meningococcal invasion from the bloodstream into the brain. In previous chapters, there has therefore been considerable emph ...

Neisseria meningitidis is an extracellular pathogen responsible for septicemia and meningitis. The occurrence of meningitis requires that bacteria cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and induce an inflammatory response within the sub arachnoid space. The mechanisms that lead ...

Many bacterial genes are regulated in an environment-responsive fashion, and from the perspective of a pathogen, the host represents just another environment. Many genes that contribute to virulence are differentially expressed in response to host environments that they encount ...

Nonculture diagnosis is of increasing importance in maximizing case ascertainment of disease owing to Neisseria meningitidis (1). In the United Kingdom (UK), greater use of pre-admission antibiotics has lead to a steady decline in the total number of cases confirmed by culture, compared to ...

Signature-tagged mutagenesis (STM) was originally developed by David Holden while studying the filamentous fungus Aspergillus fumigatus. In attempts to define virulence determinants for this pathogenic fungus, candidate factors were selected by reference to previous cir ...

Meningococcal meningitis and septicemia are serious infections with significant morbidity and mortality. A sensitive affordable test is required to provide evidence of meningococcal disease at the earliest opportunity to improve local management and give early warning of po ...

Meningococcal serology has been mainly used over the last 20 years in the field of vaccinology, to evaluate candidate vaccines and quantify individuals’ immune responses. With the increasing usage of pre-admission antibiotic treatment (1), nonculture diagnostic methods such as pol ...

At the start of the Third Millennium, consensus has yet to be reached regarding the best techniques for meningococcal susceptibility testing and their standardization. Worse, there is no general agreement as to the definition of resistance, or perhaps more accurately, nonsusceptibi ...

Neisseria meningitidis was previously considered extremely susceptible to penicillin, with most isolates showing minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of ≦ 0.06 μg/mL. However, meningococcal isolates with decreased susceptibility to penicillin have been reported f ...

A combination of data obtained by classical epidemiological techniques with insights gained from the analysis of the population biology of Neisseria meningitidis have proved to be critical in understanding the spread of menin-gococcal disease. This is a consequence of the natural hi ...

Immunoassays employ a range of methods to detect and quantify antigens or antibodies and to study the composition of antigens. This chapter describes four useful immunoassays for serological characterization of antigens of Neisseria meningitidis: whole-cell enzyme-linked im ...

Genetic tools are necessary to unravel complex phenotypes, like the formation of attaching and effacing lesions by Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC). To inactivate a particular gene, we use a precise and convenient method that is based on the generation of an in-frame deletion w ...

Bacterial pathogens have evolved a variety of strategies to hijack the host cell signaling systems, membrane trafficking events, as well as the cytoskeletal machinery, and the discovery of these strategies has contributed significantly to recent advances in cell biology. The relati ...

Attaching and effacing (A/E) is the name given to the striking and characteristic mechanism of intestinal colonization in which bacteria destroy brushborder microvilli, adhere very intimately to the intestinal epithelial cell surface, often on raised pedestal-like structures, ...

The ability of particular Escherichia coli strains to lyse erythrocytes of several mammalian species was first described by Kayser in 1903 (1). This phenomenon was termed hemolysis and the bacterial determinants involved were termed hemolysins. The best characterized E. coli hemoly ...

The tissue specificity and age-related etiology of Shiga toxin (Stx)-induced pathology strongly implicate receptor binding as a major determinant of Stxinduced hemolytic uremic syndarome (HUS) (1). In this review, Shiga toxin receptor binding is considered in relation to the follo ...