Bacterial Infection

Maternal bacterial infection during pregnancy is associated with a significantly higher risk for psychotic disorders in offspring depending on severity of the infection and offspring sex, according to a study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force did not find enough evidence to recommend screening for bacterial vaginosis in asymptomatic pregnant women who are at increased risk for pre-term delivery.

Antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, is a major public health issue. Bacterial diseases we used to successfully treat with antibiotics are re-emerging as serious threats, killing an estimated 700,000 people each year, a number that is predicted to reach 10 million by 2050. If the AMR challenge is not solved by then, the cost associated with it will run into an estimated $100 trillion dollar expenditure.

A commercially available next-generation sequencing, or NGS, plasma assay demonstrated high sensitivity in both immunocompromised and non-immunocompromised children with one or more bacterial, viral or fungal infection compared with conventional diagnostic testing in a single-center study published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.