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Nigel, I am back to looking at blood again, my own blood and still I am finding unknown strands. I'm cautious about being specific as to what these are. To be honest I'm still not sure if these are just getting into the samples as they are prepared. It seems highly unlikely that is the case, but to prove that otherwise I'd have to know exactly what they are and where they are coming from. I've had my head buried a lot in the white embalmer clot situation and am taking a diversion away from that for a while. The first live blood slide I made up for months and the same thing is still showing up. Though these ones are not blue under brightfield. The examples you have shown in this post bare a striking resemblance to the objects in my latest slide. I wonder if you'd like to engage in a notes comparison. I'm not sure I can say what I see is "fibrous polymer filament" though I understand why you might call them that. It's very difficult to go anywhere with this without having someone reliable to compare notes with and bounce ideas off of. Maybe you'd consider sharing more images, as I am sure you have hundreds. Are you able to do any fluorescence, Phase Contrast and or Polarisation microscopy? I have found that many man made fibres tend to light up under UV but these ones like those in your images are not doing that, there is a very, very slight auto fluorescence, but that might simply be reflected UV rather than fluorescence. Have you tried any staining of these 'strands'? I know strands is perhaps not the best term but it's ambiguous enough to say I don't know what it is. I'm starting to suspect these might be fungal in nature, perhaps even synthetic fungal!!! I only say that because when I've had the GP test my blood for fungal infection they return negative for bacteria and or fungal elements, but if these are fungal like I think they are then they are likely not what the GP would have tested for, and so I take a wild leap and say maybe synthetic and unknown to standard GPO testing protocols. Any thoughts?

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