Efficacy of a Swab Transport System in Maintaining Viability of <i>Neisseria gonorrhoeae</i> and <i>Streptococcus pneumoniae</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The efficacy of swab transport systems in maintaining viability of Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Streptococcus pneumoniae is crucial both for establishing definitive diagnosis and for monitoring emerging resistance. We tested the efficacy of a newly modified Amies charcoal swab transport system, the StarSwab SP131X (Starplex Scientific, Inc., Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada), by using a combined total of 31 clinical and American Type Culture Collection stock reference strains of N. gonorrhoeae and S. pneumoniae in 46 suspensions of concentrations ranging from 10(5) to 10(8) CFU/ml. Triplicate swabs per strain held at room temperature for 0, 24, and 48 h were plated without prior vortexing, and their growths were graded. All 31 strains were viable at 0 and 24 h. Gonococcal viability at 48 h varied considerably, even among strains with comparable inoculum sizes, suggesting that viability might be strain dependent and confirming the different structural and growth profiles of gonococcal strains. S. pneumoniae strains showed consistent viability, with all strains recovered at all holding periods. This study demonstrates that the StarSwab SP131X is capable of maintaining the viability of N. gonorrhoeae and S. pneumoniae for at least 24 and 48 h, respectively, and reinforces the need for adequate sampling and for timely processing of specimens to maintain optimum performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".