Detection of Diarrhea Etiology Among U.S. Military Personnel During Exercise Balikatan 2014, Philippines, Using TaqMan Array Cards

Abstract

With TAC, pathogen load can be estimated from the amount of nucleic acid present for each pathogen, which can be analyzed further to better determine pathogen attribution and to compare pathogen load between case and control samples. Unfortunately, such correlative analysis was not possible because of the limited sample size available in this study. A larger sample size is needed for further evaluation of TAC on a specific population set, including military personnel. Regardless, TAC was found to be a useful and functional diagnostic platform that is less time-consuming, easy to use with high reproducibility, and costs less per sample compared to the current typically employed methods. The successful application of TAC in acute diarrhea stool samples from a US military population in the Philippines demonstrates its versatility as a potential candidate for a next-generation diagnostics platform.