background and objectives: for further confirmation of the previous in-house real-time pcr and cyp 141 target as a rapid and cheap diagnostic technique and a new target for direct detection of mycobacterium tuberculosis , we evaluated and compared the results of smear, culture and real-time pcr in sputa that were collected from 2 health centers. moreover we tried to evaluate the diagnostic accu...

The lack of healthcare access contributes to large numbers of tuberculosis (TB) cases being missed and has led to renewed interest in outreach approaches to increase detection. It is however unclear whether outreach activities increase case detection or merely identify patients before they attend health facilities. We compared adults with cough of >2 weeks' duration recruited in health faciliti...

SETTING Sputum samples were collected from suspected tuberculosis patients attending out-patient clinics at the Ojha Institute of Chest Diseases, Karachi, Pakistan. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the performance of the FASTPlaqueTB assay for rapid diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis. DESIGN A comparative study of 584 sputum samples using acid-fast smear microscopy, Lowenstein-Jensen culture and FAST...

The smear of a clinical specimen provides essential laboratory information that is used to make therapeutic decisions. For this study, smears were made by centrifugation in a Beckman Microfuge 11 (Beckman Instruments, Palo Alto, Calif.) and in parallel by using a Cytospin 2 apparatus (Shandon Inc., Pittsburgh, Pa.). Of 350 consecutive body fluid specimens examined, 50 (14.0%) grew bacteria. Bot...

BACKGROUND Monitoring the treatment outcomes of tuberculosis and determining the specific factors associated with unsuccessful treatment outcome are essential to evaluate the effectiveness of tuberculosis control program. This study aimed to assess treatment outcomes and explore the factors associated with unsuccessful outcomes among new pulmonary smear positive and negative tuberculosis patien...

BACKGROUND Flexible bronchoscopy with bronchial washing is a useful procedure for diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB), when a patient cannot produce sputum spontaneously or when sputum smears are negative. However, the benefit of gaining serial bronchial washing specimens for diagnosis of TB has not yet been studied. Therefore, we conducted a retrospective study to determine the diagnostic...

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis is a chronic pulmonary infectious disease that has affected one-third of the people in the world. It causes nine million new cases and two million deaths per year. Chest radiography associated with Ziehl-Neelsen acid-fast staining procedure significantly helps the diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB). Chest radiography can help the diagnosis of tuberculosis in patie...

Objective To describe the psychological impact on women of being tested for human papillomavirus (HPV) when smear test results are borderline or mildly dyskaryotic. Design Cross sectional questionnaire study. Setting Two centres participating in an English pilot study of HPV testing in women with borderline or mildly dyskaryotic smear test results. Participants Women receiving borderline or mil...