Oops!
I seem to have blindered into a hornet's nest, both off-line and on, in my first
foray into these newsgroups.
So I guess an explanation is in order.
I work the PM shift. The morning shift takes care of the state mandated tests
and if this was one of those, I would guess Microbiology already took care of
it. I never see the wet tests, only the photomicrographs and the prepared slides
that they leave behind for our perusal. I don't know if this was part of one the
officially graded surveys. We get stuff from ASCP, CAP, and a couple of state
and local societies during the year besides the required ones. I regard them as
good learning experiences. This one's turning out to be such. :-)
The outcry that my question has raised is actually pretty nice. I hadn't
considered the idea of cheating. (If I was going that route, I would have used a
pseudonym e-mail service.) It's refreshing to have experienced such a hue and
cry. It's a good reflection on laboratory workers., after all, veracity is our
stock and trade. I was actually wondering if I'd get any responses.
I was off this weekend and Monday I have jury duty. The courthouse is just a
couple of blocks from the local medical school library where I had hoped to do a
periodical search since my home library is rather dated (Todd and Sanford's
_Clinical Diagnosis by Lab Methods_ and _Bergey's_ are pushing 30 and my
Shcmidt and Roberts _Foundations of Parasitology_ (1981) is old too, plus older
stuff). Not much new research there.
If this was an actual case, I would have been on the phone to the ER to the
attending physician. Would have informed him there was something I didn't know
present and there were a lot of them. Also would have requested a new specimen.
Next Infectious Disease on-call and pathologist on-call would have been
notified.
I was actually hoping to start a discussion on the possibility of some kind of
round Apicomplexan coccidians of the kind usually found in the gut (e.g.
_Cyclospora_, _Cryptosporidium_, etc.) might be blood borne as their cousins
(_Plasmodium_, _Babesia_) are.
The possibility of artifact is also there.(I remember a new tech reporting a
poly engulfing a filamentous bacterium in a urine micro as a trichomonad!)
Depending on whether I get picked for a case, it could be a week or more before
I find out what the answer may be.
and nope, I don't think anyone's out of line.
Sorry for chewing up the band-width with my prolixity.
-mpc mcorriss at gate.net
