BACKGROUND Pneumocystis without obvious accompanying pathology is occasionally reported in autopsied infant lungs. Its prevalence and significance are unknown. Interestingly, this mild infection induces a strong activation of mucus secretion-related genes in young immunocompetent rodents that has not been explored in infants. Excess mucus is induced by multiple airway offenders through nonspeci...

PJP (Pneumocystis jirovecii) is a fungal agent by taxonomy. Ones considered a protozoan, it is now recognized as fungi based on ribosomal RNA and other gene sequence homologies, the composition of their cell walls, and structure of key enzymes. This organism generally affects immunocompromised hosts with a CD4 count <200 or <15%.Review of literature does support a rare occurrence of PJP infecti...

Anti-CD20 antibody therapy has been a useful medication for managing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma as well as autoimmune diseases characterized by autoantibody generation. CD20 is expressed during most developmental stages of B lymphocytes; thus, CD20 depletion leads to B-lymphocyte deficiency. As the drug has become more widely used, there has been an increase in the number of case reports of patient...

A high rate of Pneumocystis jirovecii colonization was observed in Brazilian cystic fibrosis (CF) patients (13 out of 34; 38.2%) who underwent bronchoscopy between March 2006 and August 2009 at the Hospital de Clinicas de Porto Alegre, Brazil. Bronchoalveolar lavage samples were collected from these patients and studied by nested PCR amplification of the mitochondrial gene coding for the large ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES With increasing rate of immunodeficiency diseases in the world, opportunistic micro-organism such as Pneumocystis jirovecii (P. jirovecii) become more important. Little information is available on prevalence of this life-threatening microorganism in Iran. This study was designed to determine the colonization and the rate of active disease caused by P. jirovecii in two ...

High prevalence of Pneumocystis jirovecii dihydropteroate synthase gene 1 mutations in patients with first episode of Pneumocystis pneumonia in Santiago, 2 Chile, and their clinical response to trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole therapy. 3 4 Carolina A Ponce, Magali Chabé, Claudio George, Alejandra Cárdenas, Luisa 5 Duran, Julia Guerrero, Rebeca Bustamante, Olga Matos, Laurence Huang, Robert 6 F Mil...

TO THE EDITOR—We read with interest the article by Sassi et al published in Clinical Infectious Diseases [1]. They investigated Pneumocystis jirovecii genotypes involved in Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) outbreaks among renal transplant recipients. To that aim, they used fragment length polymorphisms of the major surface glycoprotein gene family. This work revealed that the same P. jirovecii geno...

INTRODUCTION Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) is an opportunistic life-threatening infection, especially for immunocompromised individuals. A trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (TMP-SMX) combination is commonly used for the treatment of PCP, targeting both dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) and dihydropteroate synthase (DHPS) enzymes. Several studies have already shown that polymorphisms in the DHPS gene ar...

If at least 1 sample was positive for M. bovis, the prevalence of bovine TB among patients would be >4.2%. However, the prevalence of M. bovis was <4.2% and confi rmed the lowlevel involvement of M. bovis in human TB in Mbarara district. These fi ndings are consistent with previous work in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, and in other African or Asian countries (2,8,9). The estimation of extrapulmona...

Pneumocystis jirovecii is a symbiotic respiratory fungus that causes pneumonia (PcP) in immunosuppressed patients. Because P. jirovecii cannot be reliably cultured in vitro, it has proven difficult to study and gaps in our understanding of the organism persist. The release of a draft genome for the organism opens the door for the development of new genotyping approaches for studying its molecul...