As many of you are likely aware, May is recognized as Women's Health Care Month by the National Cervical Cancer Coalition, and this year, the CDC has identified the week of May 14th as National Women's Health Week. So, what better way to recognize these national events on the podcast than to talk about diagnostics for a number of extremely common and uniquely female issues – of course, I'm talking about infectious causes of vaginitis and vaginosis. Classically, diagnosis of these infections has been done at the point-of-care using wet mount microscopy and assessment for various clinical criteria, all approaches associated with some interpretive subjectivity, and let's say imperfect performance characteristics. As a result, molecular solutions for detection of the various pathogens associated with vaginitis and vaginosis are now increasingly available for use in clinical laboratories, and also at the point-of-care, and as is the post-COVID trend, a number of these assays, including the one we are going to discuss today, can be performed on both clinician and patient self-collected samples

Guests:

• Dr. Rebecca Lillis - Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at Louisiana State University Health Science Center and the Medical Director of the LSU-CrescentCare Sexual Health Center in New Orleans.
• Dr. Barbara Van Der Pol - Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham

Links:

• Clinical Evaluation of a New Molecular Test for the Detection of Organisms Causing Vaginitis and Vaginosis

This episode of Editors in Conversation is brought to you by the Journal of Clinical Microbiology and hosted by JCM Editor in Chief, Alex McAdam and Dr. Elli Theel. JCM is available at https://jcm.asm.org and on https://twitter.com/JClinMicro.

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