Bacterial DNA in serum of AFI patients

In sub-Saharan Africa, malaria test is often first diagnostic performed for clinical presentation of fever because of high endemicity of the disease. However, fevers are not always due to malaria infections; so, when a test is negative for the malaria it often becomes a daunting task for the clinician to figure out what the cause of the fever might be. We have piloted the use of 16S amplicon sequencing for identifying bacterial infections in a clinical sample. Here, we used archived serum which had previously been screened for specific infections of interest. We show that this high through-put method provides an unbiased platform for detecting pathogenic bacteria taxa, offers semi-quantitation of these and can be a useful tool for surveillance and developing predictive epidemiological models for acute febrile illnesses.