Introduction: Brucellosis is a zoonotic infection caused by brucella species. It is an endemic disease in the Mediterranean region. It may affect different organ systems with osteoarticular involvement in the form of peripheral arthritis, sacroiliitis and spondylitis being the most common and serious complication of the disease and it may lead to severe and irreversible sequelae. The diagnosis ...

Brucellosis is a common zoonotic disease that remains endemic in many parts of the world. Dissecting the host immune response during this disease provides insight as to why brucellosis is often difficult to resolve. We used a Brucella epitope specific in vivo killing assay to investigate the ability of CD8+ T cells to kill targets treated with purified pathogenic protein. Importantly, we found ...

After acute brucellosis infection, symptoms persist in a minority of patients for more than 1 year. Such patients are defined as having chronic brucellosis. Since no objective laboratory methods exist to confirm the presence of chronic disease, these patients suffer delays in both diagnosis and treatment. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the usefulness of quantitative real-time PCR ...

BACKGROUND Increased levels of interleukin-8 (IL-8) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) in acute human brucellosis have been reported. Previous studies have shown that the production and level of IL-6 and IL-8 cytokines are associated with the polymorphism of the encoding genes. OBJECTIVE To investigate the probable association between IL-6 (-174 C/G) and IL-8 (-251 A/T) gene polymorphisms and susceptib...

Chronic brucellosis patients display a defective Th1 response to PHA. We have previously shown that heat-killed B. abortus (HKBA) can downregulate the PHA-induced increase of CD4+/CD25+ and CD14+/CD80+ cells of brucellosis patients. In the present study, we investigate the effect of E. coli LPS, as a potent stimulant of monocytes and autologous T-lymphocytes, on the PHA-cultured PBMCs of the sa...