A holy grail for researchers and clinicians is the development of reliable rapid diagnostics, tests that identify both the microbial cause of an infection and its drug resistance profile within hours, rather than the current standard of two days. “Patients come in with a clinical disease—a urinary tract infection, or pneumonia—but the cause of that infection could be one of many different things,” explains Scott Evans, senior research scientist in biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health. “Currently, we often have to initiate treatment of clinical disease based on unknown causes and antibiotic susceptibility. If we could get rapid diagnostics, then we could better tailor patient treatment.”
In fact, rapid diagnostics are already becoming a reality. As director of the Statistics and Data Management Center for the Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group, a nationwide clinical research network created in 2013 by the National Institutes of Health, Evans helps evaluate the effectiveness of existing tools
http://harvardmagazine.com/2014/05/superbug
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