11 Confirmative diagnosis of Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL) is still being a challenge at the primary 12 health care facilities in most of the rural endemic areas in the Indian sub-continent. Conventional 13 methods for parasitological confirmation are risky and require skilled personnel hence, 14 unreachable to the poor people in the endemic region. Buffy coat smear microscopy, as a 15 minimally ...

UNLABELLED This article is a comparative study of two screening methods for pre-invasive lesions of the cervix. The Papanicolaou (Pap) smear, an old and tested screening method, is compared with the findings from visual inspection of the cervix following acetic acid (VIA) wash. VIA is a new screening method being advocated by the World Health Organization as an alternative to Pap smear in low-r...

BACKGROUND Diagnosis of pulmonary (PTB) and extra-pulmonary tuberculosis (EPTB) in smear-negative patients can be difficult. We assessed retrospectively the performance of Xpert MTB/RIF system (Xpert, Cepheid) in diagnosing smear-negative tuberculosis (TB), which represents the most common form of TB in a low incidence setting. METHODS Performance of Xpert was compared to acid-fast microscopi...

BACKGROUND Effective tuberculosis (TB) control in HIV-prevalent settings is hindered by absence of accurate, rapid TB diagnostic tests. We evaluated the accuracy of a urine lipoarabinomannan (LAM) test for TB diagnosis in South Africa. METHODS Hospitalized adults with signs and/or symptoms of active TB were enrolled. Sputum smear microscopy and mycobacterial culture, mycobacterial blood cultu...

To determine whether polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing in the initial diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) is cost-effective in a low-prevalence population, an economic evaluation was carried out between the smear and culture (NOPCR) and smear, culture and PCR (+PCR) strategies. A decision tree model based on retrospective laboratory data was developed to assess the strategies of test...

BACKGROUND Genotype® MTBDRsl (MTBDRsl) is a rapid DNA-based test for detecting specific mutations associated with resistance to fluoroquinolones and second-line injectable drugs (SLIDs) in Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex. MTBDRsl version 2.0 (released in 2015) identifies the mutations detected by version 1.0, as well as additional mutations. The test may be performed on a culture isolate or ...

The proportion of patients with recurrent tuberculosis (TB) is reported to be increased in TB patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection after they have completed treatment. Despite rising HIV seroprevalence amongst TB patients in Malawi, notifications of patients with relapse smear-positive pulmonary TB (PTB) and recurrent smear-negative TB have remained stable during the past ...

The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of a low-cost method, the thin layer agar (TLA) method, for the diagnosis of smear-negative patients. This prospective study was performed in Homa Bay District Hospital in Kenya. Out of 1,584 smear-negative sputum samples, 212 (13.5%) were positive by culture in Löwenstein-Jensen medium (LJ) and 220 (14%) were positive by the TLA metho...