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
Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have become an integral part of wide range of applications. One of these applications of GNSS is implementation of the cellular phone to locate the position of users and this technology has been employed in social media applications. Moreover, GNSS have been effectively employed in transportation, GIS, mobile satellite communications, and etc. On the other hand, the geomatics sciences use the GNSS for many practical and scientific applications such as surveying and mapping and monitoring, etc.
In this study, the GNSS raw data of ISER CORS, which is located in the North of Iraq, are processed and analyzed to build up coordinate time series for the purpose of detection the
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The research addresses the specification table and the extent of its use in developing achievement tests, as well as detects the obstacles to its use through a sample of (120) respondents from the faculty members in some Baghdad schools and colleges. After unpacking and processing the data statistically, the research reached several results: the study sample do not use the test map in the development of their tests, as their percentage reached (82%) and there are no statistically significant differences in the use of the specification table by the sample members according to their place of work or the number of years of experience. The results also revealed the most important reasons that prevent the use
... Show MoreBackground: The exercise ECG has a role in articulating the clinical history through stimulating symptoms such as chest pain (which is the most common presenting complaint indicating coronary artery disease and is seen frequently by primary care physicians) and breathlessness, and prompting additional details about their symptoms so it can facilitate communication between patient and clinician as the evaluation of chest pain can be very difficult since it is possible to have a normal resting ECG with considerable narrowing of the coronary arteries.
Objectives: This study sought to assess the roles of preparation for treadmill and the frequency of inconclusive result.
Methods: The study sample consisted of persons of all ages and bo
The isolates of Staphylococcus aureus were isolated from patients with various infections in hospitals, the isolates were identified and accurately diagnosed by phenotypic examination and biochemical tests, as well Vitek-2, and then genetic detection and diagnosis of many of the pathogenic factors associated with Staphylococcus aureus using conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and testing for association by antibiotic resistance and production of some toxins by Staphylococcus aureus. After performing analysis of statistical, it was set up that the correlation coefficient of the PCR technique using virulence genes, sensitivity test to antibiotics and other virulence factors were significant at p < 0.05, but was insignificant with the
... Show MoreThis paper reports a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) as a biosensor. The FBGs were etched using a chemical agent,namely,hydrofluoric acid (HF). This implies the removal of some part of the cladding layer. Consequently, the evanescent field propagating out of the core will be closer to the environment and become more sensitive to the change in the surrounding. The proposed FBG sensor was utilized to detect toxic heavy metal ions aqueous medium namely, copper ions (Cu2+). Two FBG sensors were etched with 20 and 40 μm diameters and fabricated. The sensors were studied towards Cu2+ with different concentrations using wavelength shift as a result of the interaction between the evanescent field and copper ions. The FBG sensors showed
... Show MoreAmong the different passive techniques heat pipe heat exchanger (HPHE) seems to be the most effective one for energy saving in heating ventilation and air conditioning system (HVAC). The applications for nanofluids with high conductivity are favorable to increase the thermal performance in HPHE. Even though the nanofluid has the higher heat conduction coefficient that dispels more heat theoretically but the higher concentration will make clustering .Clustering is a problem that must be solved before nanofluids can be considered for long-term practical uses. Results showed that the maximum value of relative power is 0.13 mW at nanofluid compared with other concentrations due to the low density of nanofluid at this concentration. For highe
... Show MoreIn this paper, the botnet detection problem is defined as a feature selection problem and the genetic algorithm (GA) is used to search for the best significant combination of features from the entire search space of set of features. Furthermore, the Decision Tree (DT) classifier is used as an objective function to direct the ability of the proposed GA to locate the combination of features that can correctly classify the activities into normal traffics and botnet attacks. Two datasets namely the UNSW-NB15 and the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity Intrusion Detection System 2017 (CICIDS2017), are used as evaluation datasets. The results reveal that the proposed DT-aware GA can effectively find the relevant features from
... Show MoreRecent research has shown that a Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) has ability to be used to discover diseases in human body as its function can be used for an intrusion-detection system (IDS) to detect attacks against computer system and networks traffics. Three main factor influenced the accuracy of IDS based on DNA sequence, which is DNA encoding method, STR keys and classification method to classify the correctness of proposed method. The pioneer idea on attempt a DNA sequence for intrusion detection system is using a normal signature sequence with alignment threshold value, later used DNA encoding based cryptography, however the detection rate result is very low. Since the network traffic consists of 41 attributes, therefore we proposed the
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