title: Laboratory diagnostic challenges in case/control studies of diarrhea in developing countries.
abstract: Case/control studies of acute infectious diarrhea require accurate and dependable laboratory tests to detect pathogens in samples from both symptomatic patients and healthy control subjects. The methods used to detect these pathogens have usually been evaluated on patient samples only, and their performance on samples from control subjects is mostly unknown. Because many pathogens occur at a high overall frequency in developing countries and thus may be present in a notable proportion of control subjects as well as patients, the relative ability of a diagnostic test to detect these pathogens in diarrheic and normal stools can have a profound effect on the interpretation of case/control data.
authors.affiliation: Department of Microbiology and Immunology, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia. r.browne@unimelb.edu.au
authors.forename: Roy M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Robins-Browne
authors.forename: Myron M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Levine
mesh_terms: D002353:Carrier State / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000382:microbiology; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D015169:Colony Count, Microbial; D003906:Developing Countries; D003967:Diarrhea / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000382:microbiology; D054308:Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli / Q000302:isolation & purification; D005243:Feces / Q000382:microbiology; D006801:Humans; D008828:Microbiological Techniques / Q000379:methods*; D015995:Prevalence; D015203:Reproducibility of Results