There is palpable excitement in the TB scientific community over the introduction of new tools (diagnostics, drugs and vaccines) into TB control activities. The development and evaluation of new tools is an important component of the ‘Global Plan to Stop TB’, the WHO’s new global ‘Stop TB Strategy’, and the Stop TB Partnership’s (STP’s) Research Movement [1,2]. While innovation and new tool dev...

PURPOSE The value of an immunochromatographic test for tuberculosis (ICT-TB) combined with clinical predictors has yet to be evaluated in Thailand. This study aimed to assess any additional diagnostic value of an ICT-TB test over that of clinical predictors in a group of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) patients as well as in subgroups of HIV patients classified by clinical risk scores. PAT...

Objective: Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) strains were emerged when multidrug-resistant TB (MDRTB) was inadequately treated. Inadequate treatment of MDR-TB cases may result in additional resistance especially non-XDR-TB and then XDR-TB. The aim of this study was to know the prevalence, resistance patterns and trends of the XDR-TB strains among the MDR-TB at a tertiary care hos...

FASTPlaqueTB (Biotec Laboratories Ltd., Ipswich, UK) is a rapid test which utilizes bacteriophage amplification technology for the detection of viable Mycobacterium tuberculosis in clinical specimens. We evaluated performance of the FASTPlaqueTB test by comparing with BACTEC 460 TB culture system (Becton Dickinson Co., Maryland, USA), polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and acid fast bacilli (AFB) ...

BACKGROUND Sperm DNA integrity (SDI) is an important factor in the prognosis of male fertility. Here we compare the toluidine blue (TB) image cytometry test, recently proposed by us for SDI assessment, with two other tests-the sperm chromatin structure assay (SCSA) and the terminal nick-end labelling (TUNEL) assay. METHODS Sperm samples from 35 men were evaluated for standard sperm parameters...

background and objectives: tuberculosis (tb) is a major problem in the world. treatment and control of tb needs detection of the mycobacterium tuberculosis (mt) in the proper samples. while smear doesn’t have enough sensitivity, culture and pcr are expensive, time consuming and unavailable in many centers. recent development of a rapid tb antigen detection test (prtbk) at pasteur institute of i...

conclusions although very rare, mdr miliary tb can be seen in immunocompetent subjects. we, thereby, emphasize that early recognition and initiation of treatment are associated with a significant improvement in outcomes. tuberculosis remains a serious worldwide health problem associated with high morbidity and mortality. case presentation our case was a young female patient with in vitro fertil...