https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-n...inate-between-bacterial-viral-infections.html
excerpt:
excerpt:
Cheap blood test can discriminate between bacterial, viral infections
A simple blood test in development could accurately identify which patients need antibiotics, Stanford researchers say.
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have made an important breakthrough in their ongoing efforts to develop a diagnostic test that can tell health-care providers whether a patient has a bacterial infection and will benefit from antibiotics.
The study was published July 6 in Science Translational Medicine.
Antibiotics have saved millions of lives and created a world in which complex and lifesaving surgeries are possible. But the overuse of antibiotics threatens to create a global scourge of antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens. Because of this problem, public health experts regularly remind physicians to prescribe antibiotics only for bacterial infections. But too often there’s no easy way for doctors to tell whether a patient’s illness is bacterial or viral or, sometimes, if there’s any infection at all...