Read the Pattern, Name the Pathogen, Choose the Regimen — Before the Culture Returns
Built for the medical student and resident who must connect an immune defect to the infection it produces and the infection to the regimen it demands, this reference moves from the molecular biology of host defense — innate barriers, complement, humoral and cellular immunity, mucosal tolerance — through the pathogen-specific syndromes and antimicrobial decisions that follow from it. Twenty-two chapters trace each immune arm to the organisms that exploit its failure, then to the diagnostic workup and treatment pathway that failure demands. The Host-Pathogen Recognition System, embedded in every chapter and indexed in the closing Host-Pathogen Master Atlas, turns that mechanism-to-management chain into a repeatable clinical habit.
Inside, You Will Learn How To
• Diagnose chronic granulomatous disease from its catalase-positive infection pattern — connecting the NADPH oxidase defect to the organisms it predisposes to and the workup that confirms it.
• Predict invasive Neisseria before the culture returns — recognizing terminal complement deficiency from recurrent presentations and ordering the confirmatory assay early.
• Stage opportunistic infection risk in HIV by absolute CD4 count — sequencing the differential and prophylaxis decisions the way the immune collapse actually unfolds.
• Move a newborn from an abnormal TREC screen to a gene-level diagnosis of severe combined immunodeficiency — the pathway from screening result to definitive management.
• Execute the hour-1 sepsis bundle as sequential decision-making — antibiotic timing, source control, and hemodynamic support in the order clinical deterioration forces them.
• Recognize rhinocerebral mucormycosis as a surgical emergency — presenting signs, imaging findings, and the antifungal-surgical sequence that determines survival.
• Select antimicrobial therapy on pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic grounds — dosing gram-positive, gram-negative, and resistant-organism infections by mechanism, not habit.
• Trace IgA and CD40 ligand deficiency to their signature infections — chronic giardiasis and Cryptosporidium-associated sclerosing cholangitis reasoned back to the defect that causes them.
Open any chapter and start reasoning from mechanism to management — the way every infection in front of you actually resolves.
