A patient comes to see you complaining of a spider bite. He shows you a sore on his wrist—the area around it is red and swollen, and the lesion is leaking pus. The patient tells you he found a spider in his car, which is why he thinks this is a bite. He also tells you that he has been taking penicillin tablets that his wife had left over after being prescribed the drug a few months previously for pneumonia. Even though he has taken the tablets for four days, the lesion is not healing and that he is really feeling terrible, with pain, fever, and chills. You suspect that your patient has a wound infection, so you sample the pus and send it to the lab for analysis.
-The lab results indicate that the pus from your patient's "bite" contains clusters of spherical cells that stained purple in the Gram stain. You tell your patient that his wound contains bacteria from the genus ______ and is classified as a ________ organism.

Question

A patient comes to see you complaining of a spider bite. He shows you a sore on his wrist—the area around it is red and swollen, and the lesion is leaking pus. The patient tells you he found a spider in his car, which is why he thinks this is a bite. He also tells you that he has been taking penicillin tablets that his wife had left over after being prescribed the drug a few months previously for pneumonia. Even though he has taken the tablets for four days, the lesion is not healing and that he is really feeling terrible, with pain, fever, and chills. You suspect that your patient has a wound infection, so you sample the pus and send it to the lab for analysis.
-The lab results indicate that the pus from your patient's "bite" contains clusters of spherical cells that stained purple in the Gram stain. You tell your patient that his wound contains bacteria from the genus ______ and is classified as a ________ organism.

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The presence of clusters of spherical cells that stained purple in the Gram stain indicates that the organism is Staphylococcus, which is a Gram-positive bacterium commonly associated with skin and wound infections. The fact that the patient has been taking penicillin tablets for several days without any improvement suggests that the Staphylococcus bacteria may be resistant to the antibiotic.

A Patient Comes to See You Complaining of a Spider