1. Specimen types, diagnostic tests, and anatomical locations for determining a potential current or recent Legionella infection.
Specimen types, diagnostic tests, and anatomical locations for determining a potential current or recent Legionella infection. Some assays are applicable to multiple specimen types, such as culture and nucleic acid amplification. In general, the success of detecting Legionella is dependent on the severity of disease, specimen integrity, technical proficiency of the laboratory, and particular test characteristics, as listed in Table 1. Additional recent emerging methods and technologies may also be used, such as mass spectrometry, but they may not be widely available or accessible. Note that Legionella infection at extrapulmonary sites, such as soft tissues or organs (e.g., spleen and heart), is rare.
Jeffrey W. Mercante, and Jonas M. Winchell Clin. Microbiol. Rev. 2015; doi: /CMR