The Updated National Guidelines for Pediatric Tuberculosis in India, 2012, [1] has rightly emphasized, at length, the need for becoming more aggressive in our treatment of pediatric tuberculosis (dropping out 3 drugs from all regimens i.e. HRZ). The area of chemoprophylaxis, however, has been left untouched [except for raising the dose of INH to 10 mg/kg/day). We all know and accept that resist...

Colorimetric phenotypic tests recently gained interest because traditional primary drug susceptibility testing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates takes a long time. We used meta-analysis techniques to review the reliability and accuracy of the nitrate reductase assay (NRA), which is one of the most popular colorimetric methods to detect resistance to first-line drugs. Medline, PubMed, ISI W...

We describe a simple multiplex allele-specific (MAS)-PCR assay to detect mutations in the second base of the katG gene codon 315, including AGC-->ACC and ACA (Ser-->Thr) substitutions that confer resistance to isoniazid (INH) in Mycobacterium tuberculosis clinical isolates. The 315 ACC allele is found in the majority of Inh(r) strains worldwide, especially in areas with a high incidence of tube...

Conventional methods for determining drug susceptibility of Mycobacterium tuberculosis require several weeks to obtain results, limiting their usefulness; automated methods and those based on molecular biology techniques have been able to reduce the turnaround time, but their high cost and need for sophisticated equipment restrict their use in developing countries. The goal of the present study...

In order to evaluate the Organon Teknika MB/BacT system used for testing indirect susceptibility to the alternative drugs ofloxacin (OFLO), amikacin (AMI), and rifabutin (RIF), and to the usual drugs of standard treatment regimes such as rifampin (RMP), isoniazid (INH), pyrazinamide (PZA), streptomycin (SM), ethambutol (EMB), and ethionamide (ETH), cultures of clinical specimens from 117 patien...

Tuberculosis, caused by the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is a worldwide public health threat. Mycobacterium tuberculosis is capable of resisting various stresses in host cells, including high levels of ROS and copper ions. To better understand the resistance mechanisms of mycobacteria to copper, we generated a copper-resistant strain of Mycobacterium smegmatis, mc2155-Cu from the select...

In this study Isoniazid (INH) as one of the first line drugs in treatment of Tuberculosis was investigated to be loaded in Solid Lipid Nanoparticles (SLNs) for reducing hepatotoxicity as well as prolonging drug release. High shear homogenization method was performed to prepare INH SLNs. To compare biodistribution of INH before and after loading in SLNs, INH was labeled by Technetium 99 (Tc99) a...

In this study, we describe a multiplex PCR to detect a AGC-->ACC (serine to threonine) mutation in the katG gene and a -15 C-to-T substitution (inhA(C-15T)) at the 5' end of a presumed ribosome binding site in the promoter of the mabA-inhA operon. These mutations have been reported in the majority of previous studies as the most frequent mutations involved in the resistance to isoniazid (INH) o...

We present a statistical summary of results from the Model Performance Evaluation Program (MPEP) for Mycobacterium tuberculosis Drug Susceptibility Testing, 1994 to 2008, implemented by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). During that period, a total of 57,733 test results for culture isolates were reported by 216 participating laboratories for the first-line antituberculo...

background and objective: molecular epidemiological studies have shown that certain genotypes of mycobacterium tuberculosis (mtb) are over-represented in limited geographical regions, suggesting of evolution of certain genotypes with increasing virulence and pathogenicity. beijing strain of mtb was initially described by its potential to cause outbreaks worldwide and its association with drug r...