We examined the potential risk of tuberculosis transmission if we modified our policy for release of patients from the "airborne precautions" category from three negative acid-fast bacillus (AFB) smears to two, or even one. Over a 4-year period, respiratory cultures from 42 patients grew Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Of these, 36 patients (81%) had a positive AFB smear result on the first submitt...

Tuberculosis (TB) is a serious and important public health issue to be addressed in India. Timely diagnosis of the drug resistance tuberculosis essential ensure initiate appropriate therapy. The detection resistant Mycobacterium (MTB) cases smear-negative clinical diagnosed pulmonary TB. A prospective case-control study was conducted on 473 samples received at tertiary care center from January ...

the aim of this study was to assess the efficacy of apical negative pressure (anp), manual dynamic agitation (mda), passive ultrasonic irrigation (pui) and needle irrigation (ni) as final irrigation activation techniques for smear layer removal in curved root canals.mesiobuccal root canals of 80 freshly extracted maxillary first molars with curvatures ranging between 25° and 35° were used. a gl...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of smear and culture tests of clinical samples of pulmonary tuberculosis after the introduction of the directly observed treatment short-course (DOTS) program. METHODS Using sputum samples from 572 individuals as a self-selected population, both Ziehl-Neelsen staining and culturing on Lowenstein-Jensen medium were carried out as diagnostic proced...

A retrospective observational study was performed to determine the sensitivity and limitation of PCR test for the detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and M. avium complex. We obtained clinical specimens collected from the respiratory tract, cultured M. tuberculosis or M. avium complex, and performed PCR analysis. A total of 299 samples (M. tuberculosis, 177; M. avium, 35; M. intracellulare,...

BACKGROUND Tanzania ranks 15th among the world's 22 countries with the largest tuberculosis burden and tuberculosis has continued to be among the major public health problems in the country. Limited data, especially in patients co infected with HIV, are available to predict the duration of time required for a smear positive pulmonary tuberculosis patient to achieve sputum conversion after start...

Background In Nepal, introduction of GeneXpert MTB/RIF assay (Xpert assay) as an initial confirmation test for tuberculosis (TB) has been considered to have impact as a significant decrease in number of clinically diagnosed pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) cases than previous years. This study aims to find out the distribution profile of suspected tuberculosis cases according to patients age, gende...

BACKGROUND HIV infection reduces the likelihood that individuals with pulmonary tuberculosis are smear positive and that they have cavitatory disease. Antiretroviral therapy (ART) may shift the pattern of disease to be more similar to that of HIV negative patients. This would aid diagnosis--which often depends on sputum smears--but would also increase infectiousness. We assessed the effect of H...