BACKGROUND Studies examining the transmission of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) strains have yielded conflicting results. METHODS We examined transmission of MDR-TB strains using contact tracing data from a low incidence setting. Contacts of MDR-TB cases diagnosed in British Columbia, Canada, from 1990-2008 were identified through a provincial tuberculosis (TB) registry. Tuberculin...

Introduction: In HIV-associated tuberculosis cases, identifying nontuberculous Mycobacteria (NTM) from clinical samples has become essential regarding patients’ treatment and prognosis. This study aims to determine the prevalence of different Mycobacteria species from immunocompromised and immunocompetent patients with suspected tuberculosis attending a tertiary care hospital in Kolkata, India....

Although the World Health Organization recommends contact investigations around air travel-associated sputum smear-positive tuberculosis (TB) patients, evidence suggests that the information thus obtained may have overestimated the risk of TB infection because it involved some contacts born in countries with high TB burden who were likely to have been infected with TB in the past, or because tu...

Background and aims: Tubercular lymphadenitis (TBL) is most common form of extrapulmonary tuberculosis both in children and adults. Acid fast bacilli (AFB) positivity in fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) specimens is low; culture is time consuming and has limited availability; and newer molecular methods are costly and availability is limited. Improvement in microscopy, such as bleach meth...

SETTING Long transportation times of samples to culture laboratories can lead to higher contamination rates and significant loss of viability, resulting in lower culture positivity rates. Thin-layer agar (TLA) is a sensitive culture method for the isolation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis that has been optimised with N-acetyl-L-cysteine-sodium hydroxide (NALC-NaOH) decontaminated samples. The com...

BACKGROUND Worldwide highest number of new pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) cases, was reported from India in 2012. Adverse treatment outcomes and emergence of drug resistance further complicated the prevailing scenario owing to increased duration, cost and toxicity associated with the treatment of drug-resistant cases. Hence to reinforce India's fight against TB, identification of the correlates o...

Patients with pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) with acid-fast bacilli (AFB)-positive sputum smear at 5 months or later during treatment are considered to be cases of treatment failure according to World Health Organization guidelines. This study evaluated the proportion, clinical characteristics, and significance of positive sputum smears after ≥5 months of standard treatment in patients with drug-s...

conclusions disseminated bcg infection should be considered in the differential diagnosis of infants and young children with fever, hepatosplenomegaly, lymphadenopathy, and history of bcg vaccination. the pcr method has a high positivity rate and can serve as a useful tool for the rapid and specific identification of m. bovis bcg substrain infection. results from the total of 34 children hospit...

HIV protease inhibitors (PIs) show antimalarial activity in vitro and in animals. Whether this translates into a clinical benefit in HIV-infected patients residing in malaria-endemic regions is unknown. We studied the incidence of malaria, as defined by blood smear positivity or a positive Plasmodium falciparum histidine-rich protein 2 antigen test, among 444 HIV-infected women initiating antir...