A Practical Approach to Infectious Diseases [antikvár]

Preface This book is intended for medical students, house officers, practicing physicians, nurses, infection control practitioners, and other health care providers who treat inpatients or outpatients for infections. It also should be useful to the microbiology laboratory supervisor or technician who wants to correlate microbiology laboratory , results with potential clinical implications. The book attempts to be a practical, day-to-day guide to the diagnosis and treatment of common infectious diseases and their attendant problems; it includes specific recommendations on antimicrobial dosage, route of administration, and duration of therapy. During the mid-1970s, we realized that there was no readily avaOable, concise, and well-referenced book or manual discussing the approach to and treatment of chnical infectious diseases and related problems. The standard textbooks contain excellent discussions of basic pathophysiology and specific diseases of single microbial etiology, but the texts usually do not emphasize, as we do here, how to approach common problems such as pneumonias, bacteremias, wound infections, or pharyngitis. In addition, for the busy clinician who may not be able to find answers quickly in the comprehensive textbook, the outline format in this book facOitates information retrieval. The topics discussed in the first edition were selected after a careful review, over a period of several years, of the questions posed most often to the infectious disease consultation service at The Strong Memorial Hospital, Rochester, New York, and after assessment of the infections commonly seen in the emergency room, outpatient clinic, and ofSce settings. New material added to the second, third, and fourth editions stems in part from the questions and problems raised by medical students, house staff, attending physicians, and referring physicians at the teaching institutions represented by the contributing authors, as well as the rapidly expanding and changing developments in infectious diseases. Based on very positive feedback about the earlier editions, we were encouraged to revise the book because of the rapid advances in antibiotic therapy and in infectious disease treatments in general. The fourth edition contains new information on emerging infectious diseases including Escherichia colt 0157:H7, Helicobacter pylori, human ehrlichiosis, and vancomycin-resistant enterococci. The increasing problems of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including penicillin-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae, are reviewed. New 1995 USPHS/IDSA recommendations to prevent opportunistic infections in patients positive for human immunodeficiency virus are summarized. Other new discussions include deep neck soft-tissue infections, multidrug resistant tuberculosis, acute pancreatitis, new antibiotics (e.g., piperacillin-tazobactam), and new criteria to diagnose endocarditis. In general, the length of the chapters has been dictated by the frequency or importance of the clinical problems, or both. Four exceptions to tids are Eye Infections (Chap. 6), Infections Due to Actinomyces, anáNocardia (Chap. 18), Infections in Transplantation (Chap. 20), and Antiviral Agents (Chap. 26). Eye and transplant infections are presented in some detail because this information is very difficult to glean from the literature and because the primary care physician may be the one who deals initially with these infections. Fungal infections are seen frequently in the