In a quarter of cases, the results influenced prescribing decisions, including starting, stopping or changing an antibiotic.<\/p>\n
Dr Sam Ray, consultant in paediatric intensive care medicine at GOSH and co-author of the study said traditional testing required clinicians to make an educated guess about which infection they were looking for. <\/p>\n
“The study has helped us to spot infections we would have missed, get children on the right treatment and stop antibiotics when we know they aren’t going to work.<\/p>\n
“Removing unnecessary treatment is incredibly important for the fight against growing antimicrobial resistance.”<\/p>\n
Metagenomic testing at GOSH also detected 50 organisms not identified by routine diagnostics, meaning it could play an early warning role against new infections.<\/p>\n
Dr Julianne Brown, head of the GOSH Metagenomics Service and co-senior author of the study said the new testing was being gradually rolled out to around 30 intensive care units across the UK treating both adults and children.<\/p>\n
“It could be a powerful tool for identifying new infections that pose a pandemic threat,” she added.<\/p>\n
“In the future, if there was to be a new mystery pathogen that could be a cause of the next pandemic, we would detect that very quickly and put the right measures in place.”<\/p>\n
The project at GOSH builds on trials at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust which first used metagenomics to test for respiratory infections in adult patients.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a quarter of cases, the results influenced prescribing decisions, including starting, stopping or changing an antibiotic. Dr…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":804076,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-804075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/804076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}