This week's case is kindly donated by Dr. Vasundhara (Vasu) Rangaswamy, a primary care physician and laboratorian who spends most of her time doing rural community health work and building laboratory capacity in rural India. She and her team found the following object in a urine specimen from a middle-aged woman living in an impoverished community in rural central India. What is your identification?
6 comments:
What so hairy! Yet so small and does not itch. Wow, it’s a mighty mite. Forgive me for not knowing more about mites. Its presence in the urine cup can only be incidental especially in a rural setting. For sure, it’s not the kind we would find in a mimolette, and still even as a dust mite it still helps getting rid of our dead epithelial cells.
Florida Fan
I’m thinking possibly an incidental finding of a poultry mite. Not knowing the circumstances of the patient (and possessing no particular expertise of poultry mites or poultry-except as a consumer), perhaps she works or lives in close contact with domestic poultry or other birds.
Sarcoptes scabei /Patrik
This is for sure a mite! While mites are notoriously difficult to identify, some can be ruled out easily in this case. It is for sure not a scabies mite (Sarcoptes scabiei mites are more round with stumpy legs), nor a bird mite (Fam. Dermanyssidae, which are big and have much shorter setae). Which leaves me with the good chance that this is an incidental finding, probably a dust mite or a forage mite from the patient's environment, that ended up in the recipient before it got filled.
The morphology resembles the ones in cases 548, 634 and 658 and this assures me it’s a mite. Wish someone would give us a lesson on them.
Florida Fan
I hope the urine wasn't for a culture! I think it's a dust mite, so the storage of the urine cups can't have been optimal, and the cups probably aren't sterile.
I've seen some of these little fellas (Dermatophagoides) in samples. We don't usually report them in feces, Graham tests, or skin scrapings, but in this case it's relevant, since it could indicate contamination. Its presence suggests that the sample was contaminated, either in the container or during collection.
-HLCM fan
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