New publications 27 April 2020

Despite the coronavirus crisis, we contributed to two new publications: The first focusing on a rare pathogen Borrelia persica. Helena used a short-read shotgun metagenomic sequencing approach directly from blood to confirm the suspected species. The case is described together with colleagues from the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute.

The second paper focuses on the diagnosis of meningitis and encephalitis: which laboratory parameters provide the best prediction for a viral or bacterial pathogen? Using various statistical models, we explored which laboratory markers (cell counts, etc) had the best predictive power to rapidly determine if it is a viral or bacterial pathogen.