Highlights This study with MALDI-TOF comprises, as far as we know, the first report describing the performance of this technology with COVID-19 diagnosis. This work would encourage researchers to explore the potential of MALDI-TOF MS to assess the feasibility of this technology, as a rapid and reproducible screening tool for diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2. According to our preliminary results, mass spectrometry-based methods combined with multivariate analysis showed potential as a complementary diagnostic tool.

Some Spanish dialects have a lexical contrast between sequences in hiatus and diphthongs. Thus, whereas, for instance, dueto 'duet' admits a trisyllabic pronunciation with the sequence ue realized in hiatus [du.é.to], the word duelo 'sorrow' can only be pronounced as bisyllabic [dwé.lo]. Similarly, [pi.é] 'I chirped' contrasts with [pjé] 'foot' in this manner. The interest of this phenomenon lies in the fact that it represents a clear case of phonological contrasts between hiatus and diphthong or, in other terms, between high vowels and glides.What remains largely unknown is the dialectal extension of this contrast and how consistently specific items are classified as belonging to either the hiatus or the diphthong class within a given dialect or across dialects. In this paper we report on an experiment designed to test the consistency of the distinction in Madrid Spanish, as a first step in the crossdialectal investigation of the phenomenon. We measured the duration of the sequence ia in a group of test words inserted in a uniform carrier sentence. The results show that for all six speakers tested, the hypothesized hiatus and diphthong classes present different durational distributions, the sequence ia tending to be longer in hiatus-class words, although there is a certain amount of overlap between the groups and some variation.

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IntroductionIgnatzschineria is a recently recognized genus associated with larvae infestation Members of this genus are pathogens infrequently implicated in human disease. During the last decade, fewer than 10 cases of infection with Ignatzchineria species have been reported around the world. Bacteria of the genera Ignatzchineria and Wohlfahrtiimonas have been isolated from larvae of the parasitic fly Wohlfahrtia magnifica, which is found in Europe, Asia and North Africa, and is associated with myiasis in several animal species, but rarely in humans.Case presentationWe report the first case of sepsis associated with complicated skin and soft tissue infection caused by I. indica in Latin America.ConclusionThe clinical and molecular findings in our report add information to the accumulating data on emerging pathogens of this type, their geographic distribution, the correlation between the emergence of infectious diseases and social and economic inequalities, as well as the effects of global climate changes on potentially unusual distribution of vectors. We consider that fly larvae should be regarded as a potential source of specific arthropod-borne bacterial systemic infections.

Cat scratch disease (CSD) is caused by Bartonella henselae, which mainly affects children. The cat is the reservoir. The laboratory diagnosis is based on the detection of antibodies by the Indirect Immunofluorescence (IFI) assay. The objective of this study was to analyze the serological evidence of B. henselae infection in pediatric patients that met the clinical/epidemiological criteria for suspected CSD. We studied 92 patients, who were categorized into four serological groups: 1) IgG (+)/IgM(+), 31,5% (n=29); 2) IgG (-)/IgM(+), 10,9% (n=10); 3) IgG (+)/IgM(-), 9,8% (n=9); 4) IgG (-)/IgM(-), 47,8% (n=44). These findings aim to promote future works for investigating the seroprevalence of Bartonella spp. in Argentina, which will allow us to know the importance of this zoonosis in our population and to evaluate new cut-off points of the technique.