Tuberculosis diagnosis after bleach processing for early stage tuberculosis lab...

• Author(s): David, Susana ; Sutre, AF ; Sanca, A ; Mané, A ; Henriques, V ; Portugal, Clara ; Sancho, Luísa ; Cardoso, A ; Paixão, Eleonora ; Duarte, EL ; Leite, CQF ; Salem, JI ; Antunes, Abílio
• Date: 2012
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10174/7228
• Origin: Repositório Científico da Universidade de Évora
• Subject(s): Mycobacterium tuberculosis; rpoB; sputum smear microscopy; sodium hypochlorite; DHPLC sequencing
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

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.