In the clinical microbiology laboratory, blood is a critical diagnostic sample that, in the majority of cases is sterile (or is it?). However, when microbes gain access to and multiply in the bloodstream, it can result in life-threatening illness including sepsis. Mortality rates from bloodstream infection and sepsis range from 25% to 80%, killing millions of people annually. Blood cultures are a vital technology used in the microbiology laboratory to isolate and identify microbes and predict their response to antimicrobial therapy. The Dark Art of Blood Cultures, edited by Wm. Michael Dunne, Jr., and Carey-Ann D. Burnham, surveys the entire field of blood culture technology, providing valuable information about every phase of the process, from drawing samples to culture methods to processing positive cultures. The Dark Art of Blood Cultures is organized around several major topics. History of blood culture methods. Details the timeline of blood culture methods from manual through automated and describes the technological development of the leading automated blood culture systems (Bactec, BacT/Alert, and VersaTREK). Manual and automated blood culture methods. Critiques manual and automated methods for setting up blood cultures for adult and pediatric patients. Detection of pathogens directly from blood specimens. Describes currently available CE marked and FDA-cleared commercial tests using both phenotypic and genotypic markers, including their strengths and limitations. The workflow of culturing blood. Includes best practices from specimen collection to culture system verification, processing positive cultures for microbe identification and antibiotic susceptibility determination, along with the epidemiology of positive blood cultures and the value of postmortem blood cultures. Microorganisms in the blood. Examines the concept of a blood microbiome in healthy and diseased individuals. The Dark Art of Blood Cultures is a resource that clinicians, laboratorians, lab directors, and hospital administrators will find engaging and extremely useful.

Offering a cultural history of blood as it was mobilized across twentieth-century U.S. medicine, militarisms, and popular culture, Hannabach examines the ways that blood has saturated the cultural imaginary. In the clinical microbiology laboratory, blood is a critical diagnostic sample that, in the majority of cases is sterile (or is it?). However, when microbes gain access to and multiply in the bloodstream, it can result in life-threatening illness including sepsis. Mortality rates from bloodstream infection and sepsis range from 25% to 80%, killing millions of people annually. Blood cultures are a vital technology used in the microbiology laboratory to isolate and identify microbes and predict their response to antimicrobial therapy. History of blood culture methods. Details the timeline of blood culture methods from manual through automated and describes the technological development of the leading automated blood culture systems (Bactec, BacT/Alert, and VersaTREK). Manual and automated blood culture methods. Critiques manual and automated methods for setting up blood cultures for adult and pediatric patients. Detection of pathogens directly from blood specimens. Describes currently available CE marked and FDA-cleared commercial tests using both phenotypic and genotypic markers, including their strengths and limitations. The workflow of culturing blood. Includes best practices from specimen collection to culture system verification, processing positive cultures for microbe identification and antibiotic susceptibility determination, along with the epidemiology of positive blood cultures and the value of postmortem blood cultures. Microorganisms in the blood. Examines the concept of a blood microbiome in healthy and diseased individuals.

Offering a cultural history of blood as it was mobilized across twentieth-century U.S. medicine, militarisms, and popular culture, Hannabach examines the ways that blood has saturated the cultural imaginary.

“A witty, scientifically accurate, and often intensely creepy exploration of sanguivorous creatures.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Bill Schutt turns whatever fear and disgust you may feel towards nature’s vampires into a healthy respect for evolution’s power to fill every conceivable niche.”—Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex and Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life For centuries, blood feeders have inhabited our nightmares and horror stories, as well as the shadowy realms of scientific knowledge. In Dark Banquet, zoologist Bill Schutt takes us on a fascinating voyage into the world of some of nature’s strangest creatures—the sanguivores. Using a sharp eye and mordant wit, Schutt makes a remarkably persuasive case that blood feeders, from bats to bedbugs, are as deserving of our curiosity as warmer and fuzzier species are—and that many of them are even worthy of conservation. Examining the substance that sustains nature’s vampires, Schutt reveals just how little we actually knew about blood until well into the twentieth century. We revisit George Washington on his deathbed to learn how ideas about blood and the supposedly therapeutic value of bloodletting, first devised by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, survived into relatively modern times. Dark Banquet details our dangerous and sometimes deadly encounters with ticks, chiggers, and mites (the ­latter implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder—currently devastating honey bees worldwide). Then there are the truly weird—vampire finches. And if you thought piranha were scary, some people believe that the candiru (or willy fish) is the best reason to avoid swimming in the Amazon. Enlightening and alarming, Dark Banquet peers into a part of the natural world to which we are, through our blood, inextricably linked.

London. A snowy December, 1888. Sherlock Holmes, 34, is languishing and back on cocaine after a disastrous Ripper investigation. Watson can neither comfort nor rouse his friend – until a strangely encoded letter arrives from Paris.

As a young man, Jan Verplaetse saw a hare suspended from a meat hook, skinned and gutted. What struck him so forcefully at the time was not the animal itself, but the blood gently dripping from its mouth. His reaction prompted the start of a quest he undertakes in this book: to investigate our fascination with blood, the most vital of fluids. Blood Rush shows how, throughout history, blood has had the capacity to intoxicate us, to the point that we lose ourselves, whether in violence, through hunting, fighting, or killing, or in the vicarious thrill of watching sporting events, horror films, or video games. Are these feelings physical, or in our imagination? Where does the magic of blood come from? In his deeply researched and provocative narrative, Verplaetse moves from antiquity to the present, from magic to experimental psychology, from philosophy to religion and scientific discoveries, to demonstrate why blood at once attracts and repels us.