Bacteraemia or endocarditis caused by Streptococcus bovis, a non-enterococcal group D streptococcus, is a very common finding in patients suffering from intestinal tumours or other colon diseases. A case of a patient with a lateral neck abscess caused by S. bovis is reported. During the treatment the patient was found to have colonic malignant lesions. The problems in the appropriate diagnosis and the possible correlation between these two clinical entities are presented and discussed.

Infantile fibromatosis, one of the fibrous tumours of infancy and childhood, is a fibroproliferative lesion characterized by aggressive local invasion without any tendency to metastasize, the absence of cytological evidence of malignancy and a high rate of local recurrence when incompletely excised. We report a case of infantile (desmoid-type) fibomatosis in a seven-year-old girl arising from the deep lobe of the parotid gland that was treated by complete surgical excision with preservation of the facial nerve. The clinical features, pathology and treatment are briefly discussed.

The authors present a case of oncocytoma of the nasal cavity in a 60-year-old woman. The tumour shows the same histological and ultrastructural characteristics of oncocytomas arising in minor salivary glands of other sites and major salivary glands. The authors stress that the biological behaviour of oncocytomas of the nasal cavity seems related to their local growth rather than to the cytological characteristics of the tumour. The extreme rarity of this tumour in the nasal cavity is particularly emphasized. The few cases reported previously in literature are briefly reviewed.

Microcystic adnexal carcinoma (MAC) is a rare adnexal tumour which has only recently been recognized as a separate clinicopathological entity. It typically affects the face of the middle-aged and often requires extensive surgical excision, due to its locally invasive nature. Its clinical significance is that, despite being locally invasive, MAC is typified by a lack of metastatic spread. We present a case and review of the literature.