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Dr. Jeffrey Jones, MD, MPH
Occupational and Travel Medicine
Indianapolis Travel Clinic
Dr. Jones leads a specialized travel medicine clinic. His practice focuses on both outbound travelers and patients returning from abroad. Additionally, he provides essential guidance to infectious disease specialists and hospital infection prevention teams.
Beyond his clinical responsibilities, Dr. Jones dedicates time to teaching international health to medical students at both the undergraduate and post-graduate levels. He serves as a preceptor in the Franciscan Family Medicine Residency program.
Through his partnerships with various NGOs, he also extends his expertise to support volunteers working in remote locations around the world.
Dr. Jones encountered a particularly challenging case involving a child who had recently returned to the United States after traveling to Europe with family.
The patient developed sudden-onset Bell’s palsy three days after arriving back in the U.S. from Europe, accompanied by low-grade fevers and headaches. Bell’s Palsy is a syndrome in which a cranial nerve is affected, partially paralyzing the face.
The family reported that these symptoms began about three weeks after leaving Europe. They had stopped in Hawaii for a few days to vacation and visit friends before returning home.
Dr. Jones was contacted on day five of the illness. By then, the patient exhibited additional symptoms: tiredness, lack of appetite, excessive sleepiness, and occasional confusion about location and surroundings.
No one else in the household reported similar symptoms.
Dr. Jones gathered that the child had stayed in an urban environment in Europe without sick contacts. The family was vegetarian, and all vaccinations were current.
Medical testing revealed a normal CT of the head, but a lumbar puncture showed increased pressure (indicating infection), normal glucose, and a high number of white blood cells, also suggestive of infection.
Analysis of these white blood cells showed 30% were eosinophils, which is highly elevated.
A presumptive diagnosis of eosinophilic meningitis was made, but the underlying cause remained unclear.
GIDEON’s Diagnosis tool played Watson, the trusty assistant to Dr. Jones’s Sherlock Holmes.
When Dr. Jones suspected a parasitic infection (due to the high eosinophil count), he turned to GIDEON’s differential diagnosis tool to narrow down his suspicions.
“One of the strengths of GIDEON’s differential diagnosis tools is the ability to play around with different symptoms and different presentations in order to test different hypotheses and narrow down clinical suspicion,” explains Dr. Jones.
He entered the patient’s symptoms into GIDEON’s Diagnose tool to test his trichinosis hypothesis. The leading infectious disease platform suggested angiostrongyliasis as a possible diagnosis. This parasitic roundworm infection hadn’t initially been on Dr. Jones’ radar.
Despite his initial skepticism, Dr. Jones found that GIDEON’s description of angiostrongyliasis symptoms matched his patient’s presentation perfectly. The system’s guidance led him to consider this unexpected possibility.
Initially, Dr. Jones had doubts about the angiostrongyliasis diagnosis. His uncertainty was because the GIDEON platform didn’t list the patient’s European travel destination as an endemic location for this parasite.
This discrepancy made him question whether this parasite could be the actual cause of his patient’s symptoms. However, he then recalled the family’s stopover in Hawaii.
When he checked GIDEON’s “angiostrongyliasis in the United States” page, he discovered that Hawaii was the primary hotbed for this infection in the United States. Additionally, GIDEON listed snails and slugs as common vectors for transmission.
This prompted Dr. Jones to question the child further. The child admitted to an interest in slugs and had played with multiple different species found in Hawaii.
Using GIDEON’s Compare feature, Dr. Jones discovered a key clue. Contact with slugs and snails was characteristic of angiostrongyliasis but not his other suspected infections.
This distinction helped narrow down the diagnosis.
The combination of all these data gave him confidence in his diagnosis. Dr. Jones started a course of corticosteroids and sent biological samples to a lab in Thailand, where testing procedures for this rare parasite were familiar.
The patient improved rapidly with this treatment and returned to normal health within a month. A few weeks later, test results from Thailand confirmed the angiostrongyliasis diagnosis.
Dr. Jones explained that GIDEON helped him in several ways. First, it narrowed down the possible diagnoses. Then, it identified where the infection might have been transmitted. Finally, it helped him distinguish between the most likely causes of the patient’s symptoms.
Additionally, GIDEON provided guidance for treatment, making it an invaluable tool in solving this challenging medical case.
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