The medical analysis laboratory gets a clean room

As part of a reorganisation of its premises, the LEVY laboratory, based on the premises of the Hôpital Privé La Casamance, has created a new area dedicated to bacteriology. This area meets P2 containment requirements to ensure safety when handling microbiological agents. This means that

• Access is regulated and secured by an airlock,
• the area is kept slightly depressurised, with a specific air renewal system
• the principle of a "forward flow" of samples, with an inoculation zone under a microbiological laminar flow hood and an identification zone, is respected.

New technologies in molecular biology.

The laboratory has just integrated a brand new automated analysis system, which, using microorganism genome amplification techniques, will enable rapid diagnosis of a wide range of diseases in less than 2 hours. These include

• Detection of Clostridium difficile in stools, including the epidemic O27 strain circulating in the PACA region, responsible for highly contagious diarrhoea.
• Diagnosis of sexually transmitted diseases such as Chlamydia trachomatis or Neisseria gonorrheae , which take much longer to identify by culture.
• In pregnant women, screening for Streptococcus B, a germ implicated in early neonatal infections which, in around 1 in 1,500 cases, can lead to the death of the child. This test can be carried out on the day of delivery rather than in the eighth month of pregnancy, and appropriate treatment can be initiated.
• Detection of the carriage of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium potentially responsible for nosocomial infection, before an operation on patients at risk. This rapid detection enables isolation and decontamination measures to be taken.
• Enterovirus is the agent most frequently encountered in viral meningitis, and develops in epidemic outbreaks. The disease is self-limiting and does not require treatment. Rapid diagnosis avoids the need for hospitalisation or unnecessary antibiotic treatment.

All in all, in the field of infectious diseases, these tests make it possible to provide very rapid answers to 3 crucial clinical questions: the need to hospitalise a patient; the need to isolate a contagious patient; and the need to start a targeted anti-infective treatment rather than an empirical anti-infective treatment.