RESEARCH ARTICLE


A Return to the Past: The Vital Importance of Autopsies for Infectious Disease Practice in 2011



Francesca Cainelli*, Mpho Setime
Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Botswana, Private Bag 00713, Gaborone, Botswana.

Article Information


Identifiers and Pagination:

Year: 2011
Volume: 5
First Page: 118
Last Page: 119
Publisher ID: TOIDJ-5-118
DOI: 10.2174/1874279301105010118

Article History:

Received Date: 10/9/2011
Revision Received Date: 21/9/2011
Acceptance Date: 21/9/2011
Electronic publication date: 26/10/2011
Collection year: 2011

Creative Commons License
© 2011 Cainelli et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Correspondence: * Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Botswana, Private Bag 00713, Gaborone, Botswana.Tel: +267.3554563; Fax: +267.3105979; E-mail: francescacainelli@yahoo.it


Abstract

Introduction of clinical guidelines and algorithms, and technical advances in laboratory tests and imaging techniques have apparently improved diagnostic capabilities in infectious diseases substantially in the last three decades, and autopsies and post-mortem studies are seemingly unwarranted in nowadays infectious disease practice. Is this really true?

Keywords: Infectious diseases, Autopsies, HIV infection, Tuberculosis, Influenza virus infection..