These common afflictions often have similar symptoms, but require different treatments—antibiotics work for bacterial infections and not viral ones.

Because current diagnostic methods to sort out the two kinds of infection are time-consuming and may not be accurate, investigators Robert Marks, Daria Prilutsky, and their colleagues sought to develop a new test that would enable doctors to rapidly make the right diagnosis.

They found that the immune systems of patients with bacterial infections behaved differently than the immune systems of patients with viral infections, and developed a test based on those differences.

“The method is time-saving, easy-to-perform, and can be commercially available,” say the researchers.

When?

“Just as soon as a manufacturer steps in to provide the funding,” replies Dr. Marks in an email.

The report appears in ACS’ journal Analytical Chemistry.

A New Way to Distinguish Between Bacterial and Viral Infections The Saturday Evening Post

A: Unlike warfarin, a blood thinner used for decades that is regulated by blood tests, the experimental drug dabigatran prevents blood clots with a fixed dose that is taken twice daily. The FDA approval of dabigatran, the first of a new class of drugs called direct thrombin inhibitors, is expected sometime this year.

Q: A doctors says our neighbor died in his sleep of a massive heart attack. Could a defibrillator have saved him?

A: While it is possible your neighbor did have a heart attack, the event that likely killed him was an abnormal heart rhythm called ventricular fibrillation. You do not give your neighbor’s age, but assuming he/she was an adult, a heart attack could have triggered the VF. The usual heart rate at rest is around 70 beats/min. During VF, the ventricular rate surges to 400-600/min, preventing effective contraction of the major pumping chambers that deliver unoxygenated blood to the lungs (right ventricle) and oxygenated blood to the rest of the body (left ventricle). The ventricles during VF look like a bag of squiggly worms, a belly dancer gone berserk. With no blood flow to the brain, loss of consciousness occurs in 10 to 20 seconds and death in five to eight minutes. Sudden cardiac arrest occurs almost 1,000 times per day in the U.S., claiming the lives of half of those who have heart attacks before they reach the hospital. It is likely that prompt use of a defibrillator to shock the heart rhythm back to normal could have saved his life.

Questions (and Answers) About Blood Thinners and Defibrillators The Saturday Evening Post