Background: Legionella pneumophila (L. pneumophila) is gram-negative bacterium, which causes Legionnaires’ disease as well as Pontiac fever. Objective: To determine the frequency of Legionella pneumophila in pneumonic patients, to determine the clinical utility of diagnosing Legionella pneumonia by urinary antigen testing (LPUAT) in terms of sensitivity and specificity, to compares the results obtained from patients by urinary antigen test with q Real Time PCR (RT PCR) using serum samples and to determine the frequency of serogroup 1 and other serogroups of L. pneumophila. Methods: A total of 100 pneumonic patients (community acquired pneumonia) were enrolled in this study during a period between October 2016 to April 2017; 92 samples were collected from patients attended and admitted to Al-Imamein Al-Kadhimein Medical City and 8 samples from those in the (Center of Kidney Diseases and Transplantation) in the Medical City of Baghdad. All patients were under therapy with antibiotics. Serum and urine specimens were obtained from all patients; urine samples were processed for urinary antigen test (rapid test). Serum samples were collected and submitted to DNA extraction for detection of L. pneumophila mip gene by q RT PCR assay. Results: The percentage of L. pneumophila in two hospitals in Bagdad was 30%. Of these 26% was serogroup 1 detected by urinary antigen testing (UAT). In the other hand, 23% of samples were positive by q RT PCR based mip gene, of these 19 % were serogroup 1 and 4% were another serogroup. The sensitivity of UAT is high (P value < 0.001), which means statistically highly significance than q RT PCR. Conclusion: LPUAT is a rapid tool for early diagnosis of Legionella infection, which highlights the need of using this test in hospitals and health institutions and there is a high prevalence of L. pneumophila in Iraq that refer to the necessity of considering this microorganism point of view in future studies for detection and treatment in pneumonic patients. Keywords: L. pneumophila, mip gene, quantitative real time PCR, urinary antigen. Citation: Gauad SA, Abdulrahman TR, Muhamad AK, Jawad AA, Hassan JS. Clinical utility of urinary antigen test and molecular method for detection of Legionella pneumophila. Iraqi JMS. 2018; 16(2): 207-215. doi: 10.22578/IJMS.16.2.13
In the United States, the pharmaceutical industry is actively devising strategies to improve the diversity of clinical trial participants. These efforts stem from a plethora of evidence indicating that various ethnic groups respond differently to a given treatment. Thus, increasing the diversity of trial participants would not only provide more robust and representative trial data but also lead to safer and more effective therapies. Further diversifying trial participants appear straightforward, but it is a complex process requiring feedback from multiple stakeholders such as pharmaceutical sponsors, regulators, community leaders, and research sites. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to describe three viable strategies that can p
... Show MoreAutomatic recognition of individuals is very important in modern eras. Biometric techniques have emerged as an answer to the matter of automatic individual recognition. This paper tends to give a technique to detect pupil which is a mixture of easy morphological operations and Hough Transform (HT) is presented in this paper. The circular area of the eye and pupil is divided by the morphological filter as well as the Hough Transform (HT) where the local Iris area has been converted into a rectangular block for the purpose of calculating inconsistencies in the image. This method is implemented and tested on the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA V4) iris image database 249 person and the IIT Delhi (IITD) iris
... Show MoreRegarding to the computer system security, the intrusion detection systems are fundamental components for discriminating attacks at the early stage. They monitor and analyze network traffics, looking for abnormal behaviors or attack signatures to detect intrusions in early time. However, many challenges arise while developing flexible and efficient network intrusion detection system (NIDS) for unforeseen attacks with high detection rate. In this paper, deep neural network (DNN) approach was proposed for anomaly detection NIDS. Dropout is the regularized technique used with DNN model to reduce the overfitting. The experimental results applied on NSL_KDD dataset. SoftMax output layer has been used with cross entropy loss funct
... Show MoreReducing of ethyl 4-((2-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzylidene)amino)benzoate (1) afford ethyl 4-((2-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzyl)amino)benzoate (2). Reaction of this compound with Vilsmeier reagent affords novel 2-chloro-[1,3] benzoxazine ring (3). The corresponding acid hydrazide of compound 3 was synthesized from reaction of compound (3) with hydrazine hydrate. Newly series of hydrazones (5a–i) were synthesized from reaction of acid hydrazide with various aryl aldehydes. Antibacterial activity of the hydrazones was secerned utilizing gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria. Compound (5b) and (5c) exhibited significant antibacterial ability against both gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria, while the compounds (5a) showed mild antibacteri
... Show MoreReducing of ethyl 4-((2-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzylidene)amino)benzoate (1) afford ethyl 4-((2-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzyl) amino)benzoate (2). Reaction of this compound with Vilsmeier reagent affords novel 2-chloro-[1,3] benzoxazine ring (3). The corresponding acid hydrazide of compound 3 was synthesized from reaction of compound (3) with hydrazine hydrate. Newly series of hydrazones(5a–i) were synthesized from reaction of acid hydrazide with various aryl aldehydes. Antibacterial activity of the hydrazones wassecerned utilizing gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria. Compound (5b) and (5c) exhibited significant antibacterial ability against both gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria, while the compounds(5a) showed mild antibacterial activit
... Show MoreBackground: Pemphigus vulgaris (PV) is an autoimmune vesiculobullous mucocutaneous disease with life-threatening consequences. Rituximab (RTX) has recently emerged as an effective treatment for PV. Objectives: This study aims to determine changes in neutrophil and platelet counts for PV patients treated with RTX or corticosteroids combined with Imuran (azathioprine). Materials and Methods: The present cross-sectional study was conducted in the Department of Dermatology at Baghdad Teaching Hospital, Baghdad, Iraq. Thirty PV patients received two types of treatment: 15 patients were administered RTX and 15 patients took corticosteroids with Imuran (azathioprine). Neutrophil and platelet counts were detected at the hospital laboratory. Results
... Show MoreGas adsorption phenomenon on solid surface has been used as a mean in separation and purification of gas mixture depending on the difference in tendencies of each component in the gas mixture to be adsorbed on the solid surface according to its behaviour. This work concerns to study the possibilities to separate the gas mixture using adsorption-desorption phenomenon on activated carbon. The experimental results exhibit good separation factor at temperature of -40 .