Opportunistic infections are those infections that are uncommon except when they are given an "opportunity" to infect a person. The opportunity is usually a problem with the immune system, which can occur as a secondary infection (because the immune system is busy fighting some other chronic illness), or can occur for people whose immune system is compromised (see immunocompromised). A common type of opportunistic infection is a nosocomial infection, which is contracted during a hospital stay while the patient is ill or recovering. People can be immunocompromised from certain diseases (especially AIDS), certain medications (e.g. immunosuppressants or chemotherapy), surgical recovery, or other serious medical complaints that limit the person's ability to mount an immune response to these opportunistic infections.
See full list of 10 symptoms of Opportunistic infections
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Antibiotics often causes diarrhea: The use of antibiotics are very likely to cause some level of diarrhea in patients. The reason is that antibiotics kill off not only "bad" bacteria, but can also kill the "good" bacteria in the gut. This leads to "digestive imbalance" where there are too few remaining "good" bacteria in the digestive system. The treatment is typically to use "probiotics", such as by eating yoghurt cultures containing more of the good bacteria. See digestive imbalance and probiotics....read more »
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See full list of 15 causes of Opportunistic infections
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The US based website ClinicalTrials.gov lists information on both federally and privately supported clinical trials using human volunteers.
Some of the clinical trials listed on ClinicalTrials.gov for Opportunistic infections include:
See full list of 170 Clinical Trials for Opportunistic infections
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Any infection caused by a microorganism that does not normally cause disease in humans; occurs in persons with abnormally functioning immune systems (as AIDS patients or transplant patients receiving immunosuppressive drugs) - (Source - WordNet 2.1)
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