Successful Mycobacterium tuberculosis culture isolation from tongue swabs: Results from both experimentally infected and clinical swabs from pulmonary tuberculosis patients.

This study explored Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) growth from tongue swabs, both experimentally infected after sampling from healthy controls, or sampled from patients with smear-microscopy confirmed pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB). For both, we evaluated the performance of NALC-NaOH/MGIT960 (MGIT), Kudoh-Ogawa (KO), and cetylpyridinium chloride-Löwenstein-Jensen (CPC/LJ) culture processing methods. Experimentally spiked swabs from 20 participants exhibited 94.

GeneXpert MTB/RIF Ultra performance to detect uncommon rpoB mutations in Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Objective: To investigate the performance of GeneXpert MTB/RIF Ultra to accurately detect rifampicin resistance for less common rpoB mutations that potentially confer phenotypic resistance, we tested 28 such Mycobacterium tuberculosis cultures with Xpert Ultra.

Results: They represented 22 different (combinations of) rpoB mutations. Of 28 isolates tested, one was reported by Xpert Ultra as "No rifampicin resistance detected", 8 yielded a "Rifampicin indeterminate" result, and 19 were identified as rifampicin resistant.

A sister lineage of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex discovered in the African Great Lakes region.

The human- and animal-adapted lineages of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) are thought to have expanded from a common progenitor in Africa. However, the molecular events that accompanied this emergence remain largely unknown. Here, we describe two MTBC strains isolated from patients with multidrug resistant tuberculosis, representing an as-yet-unknown lineage, named Lineage 8 (L8), seemingly restricted to the African Great Lakes region.

Reduction of diagnostic and treatment delays reduces rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis mortality in Rwanda.

In 2005, in response to the increasing prevalence of rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis (RR-TB) and poor treatment outcomes, Rwanda initiated the programmatic management of RR-TB, including expanded access to systematic rifampicin drug susceptibility testing (DST) and standardised treatment. To describe trends in diagnostic and treatment delays and estimate their effect on RR-TB mortality. Retrospective analysis of individual-level data including 748 (85.