Background: Technicians working in high burden tuberculosis (TB) laboratories pose a higher risk of being infected by Mycobacterium from clinical samples. Contamination control is mandatory to detect the release bacteria into environment and minimize exposure workers. The contamination measurement rarely performed due lack standard methodology. This study optimized applied unique culture-based ...

Objective The present work studied molecular typing methods used for Mycobacterium tuberculosis characterization in order to learn about their advantages, disadvantages and discrimination power as regards the implementation of tuberculosis surveillance and control programs. Methods To analyze the discrimination power of each method we studied articles that included Hunter-Gaston discrimination ...

*Corresponding author: Mailing address: Division of Bacteriology, Chiba Prefectural Institute of Public Health, 666-2 Nitona, Chuo, Chiba, Chiba 260-8715, Japan. Tel: +81-43-266-6723, Fax: +81-43-265-5544, E-mail: [email protected] Tuberculosis is one of the major bacterial diseases in Japan (1). Advances in the molecular epidemiological analysis of this disease have greatly improved t...

T Beijing genotype is found frequently in Asia (1–3) but also in outbreaks of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDRTB) in various parts of the world, including Cuba, Germany, Russia, and Estonia (4–7). The largest known epidemic of MDRTB in North America was caused by the W strain, a variant of the Beijing genotype (8–9). A recent study showed this strain’s emergence and association with drug r...

We conducted a large-scale DNA fingerprinting analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains in a country in which tuberculosis is endemic (Tunisia) in order to evaluate the importance of microepidemics in the maintenance of the disease within the population. The genetic polymorphisms of 201 strains of M. tuberculosis isolated from 196 unrelated patients living in four districts of northern Tun...

There have been many reports of groups of related Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains described variously as lineages, families or clades. There is no objective definition of these groupings, making it impossible to define relationships between those groups with biological advantages. Here we describe two groups of related strains obtained from an epidemiological study in Tanzania, which we defi...

OBJECTIVES To genetically characterize and compare Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates among culture-confirmed TB cases in two regions in the Czech Republic in 1998. METHODS Consecutive M. tuberculosis isolates from 111 TB patients in Prague and 120 patients in the South Moravia region were genotyped using the standardized IS6110 Southern blot hybridization method and by spoligotyping. RESU...

Molecular epidemiology (ME), a blend of molecular biology and epidemiology, is very useful to study the spread of tubercle bacilli in mini epidemics, outbreaks, to analyse the transmission dynamics of tuberculosis (TB) and to determine the risk factors for TB transmission in a community. ME has a great role in distinguishing between exogenous reinfection and endogenous reactivation. In the labo...

While high-copy-number IS6110-based restriction fragment length polymorphism (HCN-RFLP) is the gold standard for typing most Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains, the time taken for culturing and low throughput make it impractical for large-scale prospective typing of large numbers of isolates. The development of a new method, mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units (MIRU), a variation of the...