A checklist of bacteria associated with infection in humans

Abstract In addition to a relatively small number of well-known pathogenic bacteria that infect otherwise healthy people (e.g. Staphylococcus aureus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and Streptococcus pyogenes), there is a steadily growing list of less well-known organisms, many of which cause disease only under special circumstances. Bacteria associated with infections in humans are listed in the table that forms the bulk of this chapter, which has been designed to serve as a single port of call for clinicians who seek concise information on the less well-known clinically significant bacteria. Every name in the table has been checked to see that it has ‘standing in nomenclature’: widely used names that do not have standing in nomenclature (at the time of writing) are included, but written in inverted commas (e.g. ‘Spirillum minus’—one of the causes of rat bite fever).