hausboy
Posts: 2360
Joined: 9/5/2010 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: hausboy quote:
ORIGINAL: 0ldhen quote:
ORIGINAL: GreedyTop Hen.. she's in ICU over at a hospital on the other coast... So sorry to hear that Greedy. I'll add her to my prayer list. P.S. to Old Hen-- samples go to the State labs first (called sentinel labs)-- they only go to the CDC lab if they suspect that it is something completely novel (such as a new strain of something ) or a Category A Agent. A local facility cannot send a sample to the CDC directly. Sorry. I'm a geek that way--there's a reason why my avatar is what it is.... Hausboy, in a previous post Greedy stated they could not figure out what the infection was. At this point I assumed (yup, mother of all fuckups) that the hospital had already attempted to identify the infection via the usual routes. Now, I admit things may have changed (I graduated from John Hopkins fyi), but in my day when the hospital lab, then the state lab had no luck in identifying an infection, the lab or the infectious disease specialist could indeed request the CDC or even NIH to do a culture to try and identify the infection. That's actually still the case. I understand the reasons behind it--but unfortunately (and I don't agree with it), it has to go through every lab first...before the CDC labs will accept it, and sometimes, there's just no time for that. (my former personal physician was the king of "we don't know what you have--the labs are inconclusive"....I'm big on going to specialists now!) The only exception to the lab rule (as you probably also know) is if you have something that is a "credible" hit locally, then it can get sent to the State and CDC labs simultaneously. Although, I'd be willing to bet a burrito that if one of the Hopkins ID docs found something local that was significant enough, the CDC would likely want it to take a peak at it. I'm constantly amazed by the Hopkins infectious disease MD's. (it's who I would go to if I ended up with something no one could identify) I admit.... this is probably a boring hijack if you're not into bugs....
< Message edited by hausboy -- 3/17/2011 8:13:35 PM >
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