The additional value of blood culture bottles in the diagnosis of endophthalmitis

To assess the additional value of blood culture bottles (BCBs) in the diagnosis of endophthalmitis by comparing its culture yield with that of conventional media (CM). Retrospective consecutive case series. We included patients who were treated between January 2001 and January 2010 for clinically suspected endophthalmitis of any etiology, and had vitreous specimens cultivated in both BCB and CM. Specimens from 85 eyes from 85 patients were included. The culture yield of BCB was 69%, and that of CM was 72% (difference not significant). Adding the results of BCB improved the yield of CM significantly by 13%, resulting in a combined yield of 81%. The sensitivity of detection of Haemophilus influenzae in BCB seemed lower compared with CM, possibly due to the lack of growth factors in the BCB. There was no difference in yield between specimens obtained by tap or by vitrectomy. In contrast with earlier reports, we did not find BCB superior to CM. The combined use of BCB and CM increased the pathogen detection rate significantly and should therefore be considered as the microbiological method of choice in the work-up of endophthalmiti

Crossing the Rubicon: Strategic planning or neo-biopower? A critique of the language of New Zealand’s Early Childhood Strategic Plan

‘Strategy’ is a word that has had an increasing use in recent years. The discipline of organisational studies has adopted this concept to set out the primacy of good business practices, such as foretelling risk and opportunity. Government policy documents use the term where medium- and long-term goals are set out, for example, the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s Pathways to the Future. A Ten-Year Strategic Plan for Early Childhood Education. This article uses Michel Foucault’s methodology of genealogy to trace the emergence of the term ‘strategy’, its use in organisational studies, and its displacement to education, specifically early childhood education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The study by Richard Whipp into the effectiveness of strategic planning supports the problematising of the term. The study deconstructs some naturalised truths about the image of people, of time, and of analysts’ reflexivity. It asks about the use of terms that originated in the military lexicon, such as ‘manoeuvres’, ‘strategy’, ‘target’, ‘plan’ and ‘risk’, but have slipped to that of business practices, retaining traces, however, of the original military intent. Foucault inverted the phrase that ‘politics is war by any other means’ as institutions centralised control, set up supervision of populations, and collected statistics to plot changed patterns. This article examines some of the tracery that remains in such use of governmental language, and asks if this is the most appropriate lexicon for education