BACKGROUND: While routine immunizations are very safe, their administration to healthy children requires minimization of immunization programmatic errors. In order to estimate the incidence and ascertain the nature of reported immunization errors in the Greek childhood population, we have undertaken a study using data from the National Poison Information Center in Greece, which also has the responsibility to address medication-induced errors. METHODS: All immunization errors concerning children and reported to the National Poison Information Center during the 2-yr period 1999-2000 were retrieved and the conditions of their occurrence were examined. The incidence of reported errors was calculated under the assumption that during each year 100,000 children are born in Greece, and during their childhood they receive a total of about 20 immunization doses of all childhood immunizations. RESULTS: There were 40 immunization errors reported, corresponding to a reported incidence of about 11 per million immunization doses. Of these errors, 20 concerned OPV, 13 DTP, 5 MMR, 1 Haemophilus influenza and 1 Hepatitis B immunizations. In 12 instances an erroneous route was used (out of which 11 concerned OPV), whereas overdose was documented in 13 instances (out of which 8 concerned OPV). The third most common error was administration of DTP instead of the recommended Td vaccine. No adverse patient outcomes were reported. CONCLUSIONS: In Greece, reported errors in immunization practice are relatively rare. Packaging modifications (about one in three errors in this study) of the OPV and DTP could further reduce their incidence.

Pseudomonas luteola is uncommonly implicated in clinical infections, but it constitutes a significant nosocomial pathogen causing mainly infections associated with foreign material. This report describes an unusual case of a Pseudomonas luteola strain that infected and caused cutaneous abscess and bacteraemia in a previously healthy man.

Adiponectin, an adipocyte-secreted hormone, is closely and inversely associated with insulin resistance and was recently found to be inversely and independently associated with endometrial cancer. Because insulin resistance in the setting of obesity has also been associated with the development of breast cancer, we have hypothesized that decreased adiponectin levels might underlie the association between breast cancer and obesity/insulin resistance. We evaluated the association of adiponectin with the occurrence of breast cancer in a case-control study comprising 174 women with newly diagnosed, histologically confirmed breast cancer and 167 controls. We found an inverse, fairly strong, and statistically significant association of serum adiponectin with breast cancer (odds ratio, 0.84; 95% confidence interval, 0.71-0.99). Importantly, despite a fairly robust inverse association of adiponectin with breast cancer risk among postmenopausal women (odds ratio, 0.82; 95% confidence interval, 0.67-1.00), no such significant association between adiponectin and breast cancer was found among premenopausal women. The observed associations were independent of possible effects of major components of the IGF system, leptin, body mass index, sociodemographic variables, and known risk factors for breast cancer. Future studies are needed to prove causality and provide further insights into both the mechanisms underlying the actions of this hormone and its potential role in breast cancer.

We report a rare case of a 21-year-old man with leptospirosis mimicking acute pancreatitis and cholecystitis. This case report aims at pointing out the need of taking into consideration the possibility of leptospirosis in patients with an influenza-like syndrome, headache accompanied by acute abdominal pain and a suspicious exposure in order to prevent unnecessary surgical interventions.