Early diagnosis of leptospirosis by conventional methods: one-year prospective study.

Several techniques are available for the diagnosis of leptospirosis and microscopic agglutination test is considered as gold standard, but these require sophisticated techniques and instruments. This study was conducted to know the sensitivity and specificity of dark field microscopy (DFM) as compared to IgM enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in correlation with clinical diagnosis. It is a prospective study of 297 samples received from clinically suspected cases of leptospirosis for DFM and IgM ELISA. We tried to evaluate the easily available technique, DFM. We got promising results with DFM. Specificity and sensitivity were observed to be 61% and 60%, respectively, alone and 95.8% efficacy when combined with IgM ELISA. Thus, DFM should be tried for where other diagnostic tools are not easily available. It is an easy and rapid technique, which can help in the early diagnosis and management of patients.

Prevalence of infections in renal transplant recipients of north India.

Renal transplant is usually performed at the end stage of renal disease. Most of the transplant recipients become susceptible to infections due to chronic uremia, protein depletion, anemia and administration of immunosuppressive drugs. It is a retrospective study of 510 post renal transplant recipients. 378 (74%) renal transplant recipients suffered from the infections. Most common site of infection was urinary tract infection (53%). Out of 26% of wound infections, the deep wound infection (23%) was six times higher than superficial wound infection (3.5%). Chest infection and bacteraemia were noticed to be 18% and 8%, respectively. The common isolate was Escherichia coli (160) followed by Staphylococcus aureus (140), Enterococcus (86) and Pseudomonas (69).