Evaluation of the Seeplex® Meningitis ACE Detection Kit for the Detection of 12 Common Bacterial and Viral Pathogens of Acute Meningitis

Shin, So Youn; Kwon, Kye Chul; Park, Jong Woo; Kim, Ji Myung; Shin, So Young; Koo, Sun Hoe

Bacterial meningitis is an infectious disease with high rates of mortality and severe sequelae. Early identification of causative bacterial and viral pathogens is important to enable prompt and appropriate treatment and thereby prevent life-threatening clinical outcomes. Patients with suspected meningitis are generally prescribed antibiotics before hospital admission or cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) collection for examination. However, the admin-istration of antibiotics may render it difficult to culture the causative bacteria, thereby impairing microbiological diagnosis [1, 2] . To counter this problem, alternative methods of molecular identification, including 16S/23S rRNA gene amplification followed by sequencing and real-time PCR, have been developed. However, the clinical application of such techniques is limited because of the presence of interfering bacterial or viral DNA, timeconsuming nature of these assays, and small number of detection channels available on the real-time PCR platform [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] .