Throat Culture from Patients with Meningococcal Meningitis

Throat culture from patients with meningococcal meningitis Cartwright and Jones suggest that throat culture can be useful in the diagnosis of meningococcal meningitis when the patients have taken antibiotics before admission into hospital. This approach seems valid in the light of the inability of most of the antibiotics that are used for the treatment of meningococcal infections to serve as prophylactic agents. We performed throat cultures on various populations in Cairo, Egypt, where group A meningococcal disease in endemic. Most cases occur in school-age children, a population that we found had a 3.8 carrier rate. Only one of the 58 patients positive by culture of cerebrospinal fluid for agents other than Neisseria was a group A meningococci carrier. Group A meningococci, however, were isolated from 55 of 380 patients who were culture positive for this organism and from 30 of 46 patients who were culture negative but shown to have meningococcal meningitis by stain and detection of specific antigen in cerebrospinal fluid.