Low incidence of hypervirulent clinical klebsiella pneumoniae producing carbapenemases among Jordanian hospitalized patients

Background:  Klebsiella species are widely present in the environment and colonize mucosal surfaces of humans. The organism is responsible for various community and hospital-acquired infections. Increased incidence of isolates producing K .pneumoniae carbapenemases (KPCs)  in infected patients has become a significant problem in many countries, especially those new hypervirulent clinical variant (hvKP).  This prospective study was intended to detect the incidence, virulence factors and carbapenems resistant gene (blakpc2) in K. pneumoniae isolates among Jordanian patients.Methods:  A total of 104 klebsiella species isolates were collected randomly from three major hospitals in Amman, Jordan, over the period from September 2012 to October 2013. These isolates were investigated for incidence of  K.pneumoniae , antimicrobial susceptibility and detection of virulence factors and kpc gene using PCR .Results: A total of 75 (72%) of the collected isolates were confirmed as K. pneumoniae using PCR, and 74% of these were MDR to at least 3 antibiotic classes. The percentage of the virulence factors K1, K2, K5, rmpA and aerobactin were 0%, 4%, 0%, 5.3% and 10.7%, respectively. Resistant to cabapenems was detected in 18/75 (24% ) of K . pneumoniae isolates, and 10 (13.3%) of these have the kpc genes .Conclusion: This study confirms the high incidence rate of MDR K. pneumoniae and low incidence of (KPCs) isolates in Jordanian patients.  There were few isolates associated with virulence factor genes causing hvKP, and no significant correlation demonstrated between the presence of virulence factors and kpc gene in these isolates

International nosocomial infection control consortium (INICC) report, data summary of 36 countries, for 2004-2009

The results of a surveillance study conducted by the International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortium (INICC) from January 2004 through December 2009 in 422 intensive care units (ICUs) of 36 countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe are reported. During the 6-year study period, using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN; formerly the National Nosocomial Infection Surveillance system [NNIS]) definitions for device-associated health care-associated infections, we gathered prospective data from 313,008 patients hospitalized in the consortium's ICUs for an aggregate of 2,194,897 ICU bed-days. Despite the fact that the use of devices in the developing countries' ICUs was remarkably similar to that reported in US ICUs in the CDC's NHSN, rates of device-associated nosocomial infection were significantly higher in the ICUs of the INICC hospitals; the pooled rate of central line-associated bloodstream infection in the INICC ICUs of 6.8 per 1,000 central line-days was more than 3-fold higher than the 2.0 per 1,000 central line-days reported in comparable US ICUs. The overall rate of ventilator-associated pneumonia also was far higher (15.8 vs 3.3 per 1,000 ventilator-days), as was the rate of catheter-associated urinary tract infection (6.3 vs. 3.3 per 1,000 catheter-days). Notably, the frequencies of resistance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates to imipenem (47.2% vs 23.0%), Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates to ceftazidime (76.3% vs 27.1%), Escherichia coli isolates to ceftazidime (66.7% vs 8.1%), Staphylococcus aureus isolates to methicillin (84.4% vs 56.8%), were also higher in the consortium's ICUs, and the crude unadjusted excess mortalities of device-related infections ranged from 7.3% (for catheter-associated urinary tract infection) to 15.2% (for ventilator-associated pneumonia). Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Masked Interval Routing: a New Routing Scheme

We introduce the new Masked Interval Routing Scheme, MIRS for short, where a maskis added to each interval to indicate particular subsets of "consecutive" labels. Interval routing becomes more flexible, with the classical IRS scheme being a special case of MIRS. We then take two directions. First we show that the interval information stored in the network may be drastically reduced in the hard cases, proving that in globe graphs of O(n^2) vertices the number of intervals per edge goes down from Omega(n) to O(log n). The technique is then extended to globe graphs of arbitrary dimensions. Second we show that MIRS may be advantageously used in fault-tolerant networks, proving that optimal routing with one interval per edge is still possible in hypercubes with a "harmless" subset of faulty vertices. This work is aimed to introducing a new technique. Further research is needed in both the directions taken here. Still, the examples provided show that MIRS may be useful in practical applications

Artificial-Intelligence-Based Open-Circuit Fault Diagnosis in VSI-Fed PMSMs and a Novel Fault Recovery Method

Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are widely used in fault diagnosis because they are superior in detection and prediction. The detection of faults in power systems containing electronic components is critical. The switch faults of the voltage source inverter (VSI) have a severe impact on the driving system. Short-circuit switches increase the thermal stress due to their fast and high stator currents. Additionally, open-circuit switches cause unstable motor operation. However, these issues are not sufficiently addressed or accurately predicted for VSI switch faults in the literature. Thus, this paper investigates the use of different AI classifiers for three-phase VSI fault diagnosis. Various AI methods are used, such as naïve Bayes, support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network (ANN), and decision tree (DT) techniques. These methods are applied to a VSI-fed permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) to detect the faults in the inverter switches. These methods use the drain–source voltage and PWM signals to decide whether the switch is healthy or unhealthy. In addition, they are compared in terms of their detection accuracy. In this regard, the comparative results show that the DT method has the highest accuracy as compared to other methods in the fault diagnosis process. Moreover, this paper proposes a novel and universal voltage compensation loop to compensate for the absence of the voltage portion due to the open switch fault. Thus, the driving system is assisted in operating under its normal operating conditions. The universal term is used because the proposed voltage compensation loop can be implemented in any type of inverter. To validate the results, the proposed system is implemented using two software programs, LTSPICE XVII-USA, WEKA 3.9-New Zealand