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Home / The International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, Volume 16, Number 11

Tuberculosis diagnosis after bleach processing for early stage tuberculosis laboratory capacity building [Short communication]

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The diagnosis of tuberculosis is seriously hampered in the absence of standard biosafety laboratory facilities for specimen concentration and Mycobacterium tuberculosis culture. Within a laboratory twinning arrangement, heat-fixed direct smear and sediment from 74 bleach-processed and 20 non-processed specimens from Cumura Hospital, Guinea-Bissau, were sent to Lisbon for molecular evaluation of rifampicin resistance. Sequence analysis of a 369 base-pair rpoB locus detected 3.2% (3/94) resistant specimens. To our knowledge, this represents the first report on the molecular analysis of M. tuberculosis from bleach-processed sputum, an alternative to current diagnostic practice in low-resource settings.

Keywords: Mycobacterium tuberculosis; denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography (DHPLC) sequencing; rpoB; sodium hypochlorite; sputum smear microscopy

Document Type: Research Article

Affiliations: 1: Instituto Nacional de Saúde Dr. Ricardo Jorge (INSA, IP), Lisbon, Portugal 2: Cumura Hospital, Cumura, Republic of Guinea-Bissau 3: Serviço de Patologia Clínica, Hospital Fernando Fonseca, Amadora, Portugal 4: Escola de Ciências e Tecnologia, Instituto de Ciências Agrárias e Ambientais Mediterrânicas, Universidade de Évora, Évora, Portugal 5: Faculty of Pharmaceutical Science, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil 6: Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Manaus, Brazil 7: Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical (IHMT), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

Publication date: 01 November 2012

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