Mixed infection and clonal representativeness of a single sputum sample in tuberculosis patients from a penitentiary hospital in Georgia.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Studies on recurrent tuberculosis (TB), TB molecular epidemiology and drug susceptibility testing rely on the analysis of one Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolate from a single sputum sample collected at different disease episodes. This scheme rests on the postulate that a culture of one sputum sample is homogeneous and representative of the total bacillary population in a patient.

Methods

We systematically analysed several pre-treatment isolates from each of 199 smear-positive male adult inmates admitted to a prison TB hospital by standard IS6110 DNA fingerprinting, followed by PCR typing based on multiple loci containing variable number of tandem repeats (VNTRs) on a subset of isolates. Drug susceptibility testing (DST) was performed on all isolates for isoniazid,

SUBMITTER: Shamputa IC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1538999 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature