Tuberculosis is one of the leading infectious diseases in the world and is responsible for more than 2 million deaths and 8 million new cases annually. Because of the slow growth rate of the causative agent Mycobacterium tuberculosis, isolation, identification, and drug susceptibility testing of this organism and other clinically important mycobacteria can take several weeks or longer. During t...

Tuberculosis, caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and leprosy, caused by M. leprae, are diseases known since antiquity. In developing countries, tuberculosis is still the leading cause of mortality due to an infectious disease. Taxonomically, mycobacteria belong to the genus Mycobacterium, which is the single genus within the family of Mycobacteriaceae, in the order Actinomycetales. Actinomyc...

Pulmonary tuberculosis may alter volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in breath because Mycobacteria and oxidative stress resulting from Mycobacterial infection both generate distinctive VOCs. The objective of this study was to determine if breath VOCs contain biomarkers of active pulmonary tuberculosis. Head space VOCs from cultured Mycobacterium tuberculosis were captured on sorbent traps and as...

Mycobacteria cause major diseases including human tuberculosis, bovine tuberculosis and Johne's disease. In livestock, the dominant species is M. bovis causing bovine tuberculosis (bTB), a disease of global zoonotic importance. In this study, we estimated the prevalence of Mycobacteria in slaughter cattle in Cameroon. A total of 2,346 cattle were examined in a cross-sectional study at four abat...

In spite of the importance of hyaluronan in host protection against infectious organisms in the alveolar spaces, its role in mycobacterial infection is unknown. In a previous study, we found that mycobacteria interact with hyaluronan on lung epithelial cells. Here, we have analyzed the role of hyaluronan after mycobacterial infection was established and found that pathogenic mycobacteria can gr...

PhoP is part of the two-component PhoPR system that regulates expression virulence genes Mycobacteria. The goal this work was to elucidate role in mechanism Mycobacterium bovis, causative agent bovine tuberculosis, displays upon stress. An analysis gene and acidic growth curves indicated M. bovis neutralized external environment by inducing secreting ammonia. We found essential for ammonia prod...

Mycobacteria were cultured from 9% of 424 paired mouthwash-induced sputum specimens. The majority of the organisms were not Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Sputum cultures contributed 59% of these isolations. M. intracellulare was the species most frequently isolated. The non-M. tuberculosis mycobacteria may constitute part of the oral flora of the general population and are not more prevalent in h...

Mycobacterium szulgai (M. szulgai) is an unusual pathogen in a human non-tuberculous mycobacterial infection. Pulmonary infection due to M. szulgai may be clinically and radiologically confused with active pulmonary tuberculosis. In contrast to other non-tuberculous mycobacteria, M. szulgai infection is well controlled by combination antimycobacterial therapy. Most of the previously reported ca...

The results for 6,532 consecutive mycobacterial respiratory specimens collected from 1,040 patients from 1993 to 1995 in a Texas hospital were studied to determine the sensitivity of fluorescence microscopy for detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM). Smears were positive for acid-fast bacilli (AFB) in 63% (677 of 1,082) of specimens growing M. tuberculosis...