Background: Currently, decision to give antibiotics in spontaneous bacterial peritonitis (SBP) suspected patient depends mainly on the result of manual cell count, which requires significant waiting period. Recently, many reports on the efficacies of reagent strips and a few reports of automated cell count are available but there has been no direct comparison study. Aims: This prospective study was to assess the diagnostic efficacies of different reagent strips (Aution, Multistix, Combur) and automated cell count. Methods and Results: A total of 250 paracenteses were performed. There were 40 specimens obtained from patients with clinical suspicion for SBP, the rest were obtained from non SBP suspected patients. Thirty specimens from 250 samples (12%) were diagnosed as SBP by manual cell count. Automated system provided higher value for SBP diagnosis in all parameters (sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPV, and accuracy; 87.5-99.1%) whereas the strip tests provided lower number in all parameters (80-98.6%). Multistix provided the lowest sensitivity (80%). The false negative rates by Aution, Multistix, Combur tests and automated cell count were 10%, 20%, 10% and 3.3%, respectively. By lowering the cut off for SBP diagnosis with the automated system to 200 cells/mm

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The level of sTfR is elevated in children with Hb-E-beta-thalassaemia. The sTfR level can be used as an adjunct real-time assessment of erythropoietic activity, comparable with mean pre-transfusion haemoglobin. Measurement of sTfR is easy using most automated chemical analyzers, and material can be obtained from routine specimen collections. Further studies should be carried out in a larger population to verify the benefits of this test to patients.

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Summary :The serum transferrin receptor (sTfR) concentration is an individual reflects of the extent of erythropoietic activity, and is a useful marker for monitoring erythropoiesis. Malaria is an important tropical disease with evidence of ineffective erythropoiesis. Although there have been previous reports concerning sTfR changes in malaria, these were descriptive studies of infected and non-infected case and there are no previous reports of correlation between sTfR levels and parasitemia in malaria. We performed an animal experiment to study the chronological changes in the level of serum transferrin receptor during infection with Plasmodium gallinaceum. The average level of sTfR in experimental chickens was 6.59 ± 11.29 mg/L. The average percentage of parasitemia was 3.4 ± 3.5 % (range 2 to 13 %). According to this study, there is significant correlation between both parameters (r = 0.921; p < 0.05). Résumé