Oral food challenges (OFCs) are necessary to definitively diagnose IgE-mediated food allergy. While generally safe, severe reactions can occur. Fatal reactions to foods are very rare, but have been associated with severe and/or uncontrolled asthma, the second and third decades of life, and when reactions occur outside the home.1 Despite existing recommendations to hold long-acting beta agonists (LABAs) for at least 8 hours before OFCs, their effects on the outcome and safety of OFCs is unknown.2 The basis for this recommendation is not clearly established, but appears to have been extrapolated from early studies of inhaled salmeterol and its effect on methacholine responsiveness in adults.

Infection and Immunity, Ahead of Print.

Infection and Immunity, Ahead of Print.

Infection and Immunity, Ahead of Print.

Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Ahead of Print.

Canadian Journal of Microbiology, Volume 71, Issue , Page 1-15, January 2025. Antimicrobial resistant strains of pathogenic Escherichia coli are a burden on the healthcare system, causing longer hospital stays and increased treatment costs compared to nonresistant strains. With whole genome sequencing almost ubiquitous in the analyses of outbreak and surveillance samples, in silico methods for feature identification can be faster and cheaper than traditional wet-lab methods. In this study, machine learning (ML) classification methods were used to predict antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and identify novel genomic markers of resistance. A total of 4300 E. coli whole genome sequences with laboratory-derived susceptible, intermediate, or resistant (SIR) data for 34 antimicrobials were collected. Three models—gradient boosted decision trees, support vector machines (SVMs), and artificial neural networks (ANNs)—were trained using genome subsequences (k-mers) of length 11 to classify unknown isolates as SIR for each antimicrobial. The models achieved high average accuracies (93.6%, 92.7%, and 92.8%, respectively) for our dataset, outperforming database methods including AMRFinderPlus (63.9%) and ResFinder (75.7%). Tested on two smaller independent datasets, the models’ average accuracies were 81.6% (XGB), 79.9% (SVM), and 81.2% (ANN), while ResFinder’s average accuracy was 94.7%. An advantage of ML models over database methods is that they can identify novel markers of resistance, which is a key advantage for surveillance and research. As more genomic and AMR data become publicly available, these models are expected to further improve in performance and utility.

Tyrosine recombinases (YRs) are widespread among prokaryotes and archaea, catalyzing site-specific DNA recombination reactions in a variety of cellula...

Oral food challenges (OFCs) are necessary to definitively diagnose IgE-mediated food allergy. While generally safe, severe reactions can occur. Fatal reactions to foods are very rare, but have been associated with severe and/or uncontrolled asthma, the second and third decades of life, and when reactions occur outside the home.1 Despite existing recommendations to hold long-acting beta agonists (LABAs) for at least 8 hours before OFCs, their effects on the outcome and safety of OFCs is unknown.2 The basis for this recommendation is not clearly established, but appears to have been extrapolated from early studies of inhaled salmeterol and its effect on methacholine responsiveness in adults.

Oral food challenges (OFCs) are necessary to definitively diagnose IgE-mediated food allergy. While generally safe, severe reactions can occur. Fatal reactions to foods are very rare, but have been associated with severe and/or uncontrolled asthma, the second and third decades of life, and when reactions occur outside the home.1 Despite existing recommendations to hold long-acting beta agonists (LABAs) for at least 8 hours before OFCs, their effects on the outcome and safety of OFCs is unknown.2 The basis for this recommendation is not clearly established, but appears to have been extrapolated from early studies of inhaled salmeterol and its effect on methacholine responsiveness in adults.

The New AntiBiotic treatment Options for uncomplicated GOnorrhoea trial compared the efficacy of gentamicin, ertapenem and fosfomycin with ceftriaxone...

This qualitative analysis aimed to explore the experiences of men who have sex with men (MSM) providing self-taken oropharyngeal, rectal, meatal and u...

Trichomonas vaginalis affects 5.3% of women globally.1 It is associated with multiple adverse outcomes including pelvic inflammatory disease, infertil...