Asymptomatic Pharyngeal Carriage of Kingella kingae Among Young Children in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Kingella kingae has emerged as a significant cause of osteoarticular infections in young children. Pharyngeal colonization is considered a prerequisite for invasive K. kingae infection. We conducted a prospective study to estimate the prevalence of pharyngeal carriage of K. kingae among healthy young children in Vancouver. METHODS: From March 2016 to May 2017, children between 6 and 48 months of age visiting British Columbia Children's Hospital outpatient clinics for noninfectious causes were included in the study. Another set of participants was enrolled from a day-care center located at British Columbia Children's Hospital. A single-throat swab was collected after obtaining consent from parent/guardian. The samples were stored at -70°C and tested using an in-house developed real-time polymerase chain reaction assay. Epidemiologic characteristics and risk factors for K. kingae colonization were collected via a study questionnaire. RESULTS: A total of 179 children were enrolled in the study, but only 174 samples were eligible for testing. Of the 174 samples, 5 had indeterminate results and the remaining 169 samples were negative by K. kingae polymerase chain reaction. The median age of participants was 23 months. About 36% of children were attending day care and had another sibling <5 years of age. Previous history of cold symptoms and antibiotic use was reported in 42% and 12%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The results of our study showed no prevalence of asymptomatic pharyngeal carriage of K. kingae in young children in Vancouver. Additional multicenter studies may help to understand the differences in pharyngeal carriage rate among healthy children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".