The ongoing Brucella exposure monitoring is still making everyone a bit stressed.  A few people have opted to take the antibiotic cocktail of doxycycline plus rifampicin without the advent of any symptoms.  Who am I to judge how you deal with your health and health issues though.  These people will have a jump on treatment before the rest, however the side effects have taken their toll.  A few have puked, others have had some gi issues, and there is always the potential of picking up Clostridium difficile due to the lack of natural gut flora that results from the 3 week antibiotic treatment.  Then there is always the secondary issue of taking antibiotics unnecessarily, which in turn may cause antibiotic resistant strains of certain bacteria.

The rest of the exposed, myself included, have refrained from the antibiotics until absolutely necessary, basically if and when the symptoms start to occur.  We are all still on a twice daily fever watch for at least 2 more weeks at the minimum before it becomes a weekly spot check.  Additionally we have been carefully recording any oddities with our bodies (fever, chills, muscle aches, sweats etc.) 

Last week our serum was drawn and shipped down to one of the labs at the CDC for analysis.  The CDC will be doing different type of testing on our serum where they will be looking at antibody levels and agglutination.  Samples will be taken from all of us at different time periods post exposure and shipped down to the CDC for follow-up testing.  Here's to hoping that they get the results to us in a timely manner.

Meanwhile, some of the scientists at my job did some in house analysis on the Maldi-Tof spectra and determined, in my case anyway, that when I ran the sample on the Maldi-Tof, the Brucella hadn't grown enough to even classify as Brucella on the day I tested it. This was a bit of good news in the grand scheme of things as my chances of developing an infection lessened a bit.  Like I said earlier, this whole thing has been a bit stressful but there really isn't anything we can do about it.  We just gotta keep it moving and don't dwell too much on whatever the final outcome is.