I understand that an antibody screen can be used to detect a certain type of pneumonia, among other conditions. can it also be used to identify various infections in the way that blood cultures can?

Yes: This is particularly true for VIRAL infections! Hope this is helpful! Dr Z

Yes but: Usually an elevated IgM response to a particular organism indicates an acute infection. However doing IgM ab to a whole panel of bacteria is expensive and many of the tests are not available. The culture method is the default test but can be false-negative in many cases. In the future, I believe PCR analysis of bacterial DNA or a bacterial DNA microarray assays will likely be the way to go.