Mycobacterium bovis is the causative agent of bovine tuberculosis (BTB), the pathogen responsible for serious economic impact on the livestock sector. In order to obtain data on isolated M. bovis strains and assist in the control and eradication program for BTB, a cross sectional descriptive molecular epidemiology study in the Brazilian Midwest was conducted. Through spoligotyping and 24-loci M...

BACKGROUND We present the first comprehensive analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) isolates circulating in southern Taiwan. In this 9-year population-based study, the TB situation in the Kaohsiung region was characterized by genotypic analysis of 421 MTB isolates. METHODS All 421 isolates of MTB were analyzed by spoligotyping and MIRU-VNTR typing. Drug-resistance patterns were also an...

Mycobacterium africanum is an important cause of tuberculosis (TB) in West Africa. So far, two lineages called M. africanum West African 1 (MAF1) and M. africanum West African 2 (MAF2) have been defined. Although several molecular studies on MAF2 have been conducted to date, little is known about MAF1. As MAF1 is mainly present in countries around the Gulf of Guinea we aimed to estimate its pre...

Three case-patients had emigrated from Romania, and all 5 case-patients lived in the same area of Almeria. These data indicated that the susceptible strain was circulating in the geographic/epi-demiological context of the current case-patient before and when she tested positive for that strain; therefore, she likely acquired the susceptible strain through recent transmission. The presence of su...

HIV-1 infection and HIV-1-induced immune deficiency may play a role in selecting particular Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) strains (i.e. genotypes). We compared 43 MTB isolates obtained from HIV-1-infected patients with 77 MTB isolates obtained from HIV-1-uninfected patients in Burkina Faso, by means of DNA fingerprinting methods (MIRU-VNTR plus spoligotyping). This study suggests a lack of s...

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a major health problem in Iraq but the strains responsible for the epidemic have been poorly characterized. Our aim was to characterize the TB strains circulating in Bagdad (Iraq). A total of 270 Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) strains isolated between 2010 and 2011 from TB patients attending the Center of Chest and Respiratory diseases in Baghdad were analyz...

Like in most developing countries, tuberculosis represents a major public health problem in Morocco. This paper describes the first study combining molecular and conventional epidemiology of tuberculosis in Casablanca, the economic capital of this country. Molecular fingerprinting of the genomic DNA recovered from cultures of sputum of 150 patients was performed by MIRU-VNTR. This molecular mar...