While the treatment of Mycobacterium tuberculosis is firmly based on multiple controlled clinical trials in various settings 2 and meet the criteria for ‘A’ category recommendations, the management of opportunist mycobacteria (mycobacteria other than tuberculosis (MOTT), nontuberculous mycobacteria, environmental mycobacteria, atypical mycobacteria) is much less so. When the Joint Tuberculosis ...

Atypical mycobacteria, also known as nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) includes acid-fast bacteria other than Mycobacterium tuberculosis. NTM can be isolated from a variety of environmental sources including water, food products, domestic animals, and soil; human exposure is typically from soil to the oral cavity and respiratory tract. Diagnosis of NTM is suspected in children less than five ye...

A large portion of the coding capacity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis is devoted to the production of proteins containing several copies of the pentapeptide-2 repeat, namely the PE/PPE_MPTR proteins. Protein domain repeats have a variety of binding properties and are involved in protein-protein interactions as well as binding to other ligands such as DNA and RNA. They are not as common in prokar...

Objective: Mycobacteriosis is frequently diagnosed among HIV-infected patients. In Mozambique, where few patients are under antiretroviral therapy and the prevalence of tuberculosis is high, there is need for better characterization of mycobacteria at the species level, as well as for the identification of patterns of resistance to antituberculous drugs. Methods: We studied a sample of 503 HIV-...

The highly complex nature of interactions of Mycobacterium tuberculosis with cells of the immune system has puzzled researchers the world-over in understanding the pathogenesis and immunology associated with tuberculosis (TB). This has contributed to the delay in development of effective vaccine(s) for TB. Several excellent studies have provided only a glimpse of the kind and degree of immune r...

In the process of studying conventional methods for differentiation of mycobacteria, a number of compounds were tested in this laboratory. Among them, hydroxylamine and 8-azaguanine were found to be useful. Among slowly growing mycobacteria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and 11. bovis were distinguished from others by their sensitivity to both compounds; among rapidly growing mycobacteria, fortuit...

BACKGROUND Randomized trials assessing BCG vaccine protection against tuberculosis have widely varying results, for reasons that are not well understood. METHODS We examined associations of trial setting and design with BCG efficacy against pulmonary and miliary or meningeal tuberculosis by conducting a systematic review, meta-analyses, and meta-regression. RESULTS We identified 18 trials r...

Pulmonary tuberculosis is relatively frequent in workers exposed to silica or a mixed dust containing silica (Marchand, 1972). This increased susceptibility has been shown in relation to silica itself (Hunter, i962),coal (Rivers, James, Davies & Thompson, 1957) and talc (Siegal, Smith & Grecnburg, 1943). Since graphite too contains a proportion of silica which is about 2 % in the purest commerc...

BACKGROUND Xpert® MTB/RIF is a molecular test for the detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and rifampicin resistance. It is considered to be a great advance over smear microscopy and culture. However, there is very little information regarding the performance characteristics of Xpert MTB/RIF in Malawi. OBJECTIVE We aimed to evaluate the performance of Xpert MTB/RIF in a Malawian setting. ...

Introduction Different terms are used to define non-tuberculosis mycobacteria [NTM] including atypical mycobarcteria and mycobacteria other than tuberculosis [MOTT]. However, NTM terminology is the most used name worldwide. NTM, an emerging entity, includes more than 100 species with variable microbiological features, clinical manifestations and significances. Nevertheless, NTM therapy also dif...