Spin fluctuations and superconductivity in UPt3.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to D Fay.
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Of 3 alcoholic patients with severe lactic acidosis, one had shoshin beriberi; the second--a beer drinker--presented with convulsions associated with hyponatraemia and complicated by rhabdomyolysis and was not thiamine-deficient; the third patient had convulsions associated with Korsakoff's syndrome and was thiamine-deficient. In all three patients treatment with thiamine administered alone corrected the lactic acidosis within less than 4 hours. In patient 1, this result was obtained after symptomatic treatment of shock and lactic acidosis had failed and more than 24 hours before the haemodynamic disorders were corrected. In patient 2, who had no haemodynamic nor haematosis disorders, the lactic acidosis was corrected within 2 hours, i.e. more than 24 hours before neurological improvement developed. In patient 3, the lactic acidosis was also corrected within 2 hours. These results suggest that thiamine should figure among the treatments of lactic acidosis in alcoholic patients. Since thiamine alone is capable of correcting severe lactic acidosis, at least in some of these patients, it deserves to be tried in other types of lactic acidosis.
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A rapid, radiometric method was developed to determine the susceptibility of filamentous fungi to amphotericin B. The rapid, radiometric method depended on measurement of the inhibition of 14CO2 production in the presence of amphotericin B. Thirty isolates of filamentous fungi were tested by the rapid, radiometric method and a reference agar dilution method. There was 93% agreement between the two methods when an 80% or greater decrease in CO2 production was used to calculate the minimal inhibitory concentration with the rapid, radiometric method. Minimal inhibitory concentrations, based on 80% decrease of CO2 production, were achieved within 24 h of incubation with all of the fungi tested.
Lungs from 224 patients, obtained at autopsy, were examined for Legionella pneumophila by fluorescent antibody (FA) staining. Of 121 patients who died with pneumonia, L pneumophila was present in eight cases (6.6%). (Two of the eight patients exhibited no important respiratory symptoms or fever, although pneumonia contributed considerably to their deaths. Preexisting underlying disease was present in all cases. Legionnaires' disease (LD), endemic in the central Ohio area, may cause up to 3.6% of the nosocomial pneumonias at the study site. Application of the local incidence of LD to the number of annual adult deaths in the United States indicates that many LD-associated deaths may occur each year. The study shows the importance of using the FA and Dieterle stains during routine pathological examination of lung tissue, especially from compromised hosts in endemic areas.
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Insufficient data are available to establish the reliability of direct disk diffusion susceptibility tests performed utilizing positive blood culture broth as inoculum. When Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 25923, Escherichia coli ATCC 25922, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa ATCC 27853 were used, 0.03 ml of turbid overnight blood culture broth was found to produce zone diameters closely approximating the size of diameters obtained by a standardized method. Results of direct (0.03 ml of inoculum) and standardized susceptibility tests were then compared for 116 positive blood cultures (1,069 individual disk comparisons). There were 1,011 test agreements (94.6%). There were also 48 (4.5%) minor discrepancies (change between sensitive and intermediate or between intermediate and resistant) and 10 (0.9%) major discrepancies (change between sensitive and resistant). The major discrepancies were randomly distributed among several organisms and antibiotics. Discrepancies occurred most frequently in the more clinically acceptable direction; i.e., in 79.3% the direct test indicted greater resistance than the standardized test. These data establish that 0.03 ml of turbid overnight blood culture broth produces results which compare closely to those obtained with standard methods, and in practice yield direct susceptibility results with a clinically acceptable level of reliability.
Three patients with severe pneumonia at a community hospital in Columbus, Ohio, were found to have Legionnaires' disease in late August 1977. A subsequent serologic survey of patients with pneumonia at this hospital identified three additional cases. Among patients with pneumonia, hospital exposure in the 2 weeks before onset of illness was significantly associated with Legionnaires' disease (P = 0.003). Serosurveys of hospital employees with a recent history of upper respiratory illness, healthy employees, and workers at the hospital construction site showed that one of 101, one of 107, and none of 114, respectively, has a single reciprocal titer of greater than or equal to 256 to the Legionnaires' disease (LD) bacterium. Serosurveys of patients with pneumonia at three control hospitals identified five additional patients with Legionnaires' disease, three of them with pneumonia that was apparently hospital acquired in a single renal transplant unit. A fourth patient from that unit without clinical illness had a fourfold rise in titer to LD bacterium.
The morphologies of native and chloroform-methanol-treated mycobacteriophage R1 were compared by electron microscopy, utilizing three negative stains. R1 was determined to be a complex phage. The head appears as an elongated cylinder with a pointed end (93 +/- 3 by 42 +/- 3 nm) constructed from an orderly arrangement of capsomeres. The phage tail measures 209 +/- 11 by 11 +/- 1 nm and possesses a striated surface with two base plates at its distal end. Treatment of R1 with chloroform-methanol resulted in disruption of both the head and tail structures and was accompanied by loss of infectivity. However, because no likely lipid-containing structure was observed in native phages, there is the possibility that the mechanism of chloroform-methanol inactivation is something other than lipid extraction.
Eight patients with atypical pneumonia caused by the Legionnaires' disease organism were seen during the spring and summer of 1977. Two died of the acute illness. All patients were febrile and presented with symptoms of acute respiratory infection. Other symptoms included malaise, anorexia, chills, myalgia, and headache. Severe hypoxemia was a striking feature. Conventional methods to determine the etiology of these pneumonias were unsuccessful but subsequent serological studies confirmed the diagnosis of Legionnaires' disease. Seven patients were treated with beta-lactam antibiotics alone or with an aminoglycoside and all failed to respond. Six were subsequently treated with erythromycin and five who received this drug for at least 48 hours were markedly improved within this time period. We believe that erythromycin is effective in the treatment of Legionnaires' disease.
A panel of monoclonal antibodies produced against surface membrane components of the human colon tumor cell line Caco-2 was found to define oncofetal crypt cell antigens (CCA) expressed by fetal intestinal cells, adult small intestinal crypt cells, and human and rat colonic adenocarcinomas. The epitopes recognized by these antibodies have been identified as O-linked oligosaccharide chains associated with specific glycoproteins in cultured intestinal cells and in colon tumors in vivo. Analysis of a large group of normal and diseased human intestinal specimens has demonstrated a marked heterogeneity in CCA expression which correlated with the degree of organization of the tumor cells in the tissue, suggesting that the CCA represent useful histological and clinical markers for colon cancer.