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Introduction to Clinical Mycology

Part 4



Sharpen Observation Skills

Slide 26

March 2012

I think something else that we need to remember and that is that we have rapid ways of detecting things in clinical specimens, for example the Gram stain. We read a Gram stain, and we have mentioned this before, you need to think clinical microbiology because you can find fungi in Gram stains, you can see other things in there as well. When you are reading bacterial cultures, look there and see if you are going to pick up something like a fungus or maybe even another bacterium like Nocardia that the bacteriology lab might look at. When you are reading acid-fast smears, don’t just look for a mycobacteria, look in the background and see if you see a fungus. In terms of histopathology, the pathologists are primarily looking for tissue morphology. They are looking for tumors, looking for infection, looking for a lot of things. They often times don’t have the time to spend looking at a biopsy. And the laboratory can help them in certain circumstances because the organisms that you see in a direct examination of a clinical specimen look the very same as they look in a biopsy, the tissue morphologies, the tissue is stained and the organism looks the same.

Sharpen Observation Skills
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