Volume 18, Number 5—May 2012

Amebic colitis is increasing among younger men who have syphilis or HIV.

Incidence of serotype e was 3-fold lower than serotype f, but it caused more severe clinical disease.

A single clone of Streptococcus pneumoniae serotype 5 caused this epidemic.

Determining drug resistance trends will optimize treatment and public health responses.

Interventions are needed to reduce human exposure to hantaviruses.

Screening delayed spread by <4 days; autumn school holidays reduced the effective reproduction number by ≈40%.

Reduced genetic diversity possibly resulted from introduction of pertussis vaccines

Imported malaria cases in adults are strongly patterned by neighborhood economic and immigration levels.

Prevalence of Bartonella spp. was high, especially among patients with a history of Lyme disease.

An encephalitis outbreak among horses was caused by a pathogenic variant of Kunjin virus.

Knowing whether a patient has multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is crucial for prescribing the best treatment. The challenge is choosing the most effective drug with the fewest side effects while saving the “big guns” for the most resistant infections. The best way to find out whether a patient has this type of infection is to conduct drug-susceptibility testing. Unfortunately, this testing requires laboratory capabilities that are in short supply, so often only patients at high risk are tested. But who is at high risk? A recent study found an association between patients’ locations (health center at which they were seen) and likelihood of multidrug-resistant infection. Added to other known risk factors (young age, previous TB treatment, or contact with someone with similar infection), this information can further pinpoint who should be tested, which will ultimately lead to faster diagnoses, better treatments and less spread of multidrug-resistant TB.

The world is home to more than 1 billion pigs, which produce large quantities of feces. We know that some organisms in pig feces can cause human disease, and now we might have another to add to the list. Little is known about where the common intestinal parasite Dientamoeba fragilis comes from and how it is spread. However, recent molecular analysis confirmed that the organism found in pigs is indeed the same as the one found in humans. Therefore, pigs (or their feces) might be a source of this parasitic infection in humans.