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Global infections are very frequent cause of AKI. Often this is due to the non-specific systemic effects of sepsis and volume depletion and therefore can occur with many infectious agents perhaps most searingly brought to our attention with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The kidney can also be damaged by infections directly involving the renal parenchyma, because of persistent infection elsewhere in the body, as a post-infectious response and secondary diseases causing obstruction. Identifying, first, that kidney injury is due to infection and the particular infection causing the patient's presentation is critical to management. Some infections discussed in this chapter are confined to specific areas of the world, but with increasing global travel and migration, patients may present to healthcare facilities anywhere;thus, a thorough travel history is invaluable. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2014, 2022.
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The objective: to assess risk factors for tuberculosis relapse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results. During the retrospective study, medical documents of patients treated for tuberculosis in 2020-2022 were analyzed. 140 patients above 18 years old with confirmed tuberculosis were included: newly diagnosed tuberculosis – 50 patients, early relapses – 50 patients, and late relapses – 40 patients. At the first stage, significant factors for relapse development were identified (ANOVA): diabetes (F=19402,8;p=0,000000), substances abuse (F=547,6;p=0,000000), alcohol abuse (F=149,7;p=0,000000), MDR MTB (F=107,8;p=0,000000), HIV infection (F=72,4;p=0,000000), imprisonment (F=49,5;p=0,000000), chronic respiratory diseases (F=47,1;p=0,000000), smoking (F=29,0;p=0,000000), and social status (F=28,9;p= 0,000000). At the second stage (cluster analysis), factors implementing the risks of development of early or late relapses were identified. As well as before the COVID-19 pandemic, social, medical and biological risk factors play a significant role in the development of tuberculosis relapses;history of COVID-19 was not one of the risk factors;and stratification of the risk factors made it possible to identify factors that contribute to development of both early and late relapses and to determine preventive measures. © 2023 New Terra Publishing House. All rights reserved.
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Ken's first registrar job was at Paddington Green, then he had a fruitful experience at Sully Hospital in south Wales between 1960 and 1963, which at the time was the Welsh Regional Centre for Thoracic and Cardiac Surgery. When 92 years old, he, his wife and one of their sons developed covid-19 symptoms, Ken was admitted to hospital, and later died from covid-19 pneumonia. Consultant physician, general and chest disease, Dartford and Gravesham (b 1928;q Cambridge/St Mary's Hospital Medical School 1957;MD, FRCP), died from covid-19 pneumonia on 14 April 2020
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Background: Pulmonary tuberculosis is still a public health problem, and surveillance data analysis has not been done much. Recently a global pandemic of COVID-19 has the potential in disturbing TB elimination programs and treatment. This study aims to comprehensively analyse the incidence rate (IR) and Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of pulmonary tuberculosis in East Java from 2015–2020 and during COVID-19 and the strategies for optimizing tuberculosis disease control. Methodology: The study analyzed annual surveillance data using an analytical descriptive design. The Variables were analyzed with Spearman correlation with a level of evidence of 95% (p<0.05). Results: The prevalence of pulmonary tuberculosis in East Java fluctuated from 2015–2020. In 2020 and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of cases and morbidity rates increased. Statistic results confirm the presence of a significant correlation between the values of Incidence rate (IR) and Case Fatality rate (CFR) (p = 0.032), IR and Treatment Success Rate (TSR) (p = 0.020), and CFR and TSR (p = 0.002). Population density is not correlated with the number of new cases (p = 0.667). Treatment rates have increased to 51%;cure and treatment rates have decreased to 76% and 89%, respectively, and there was a 4% increase in mortality during COVID-19. Conclusions: COVID-19 has tremendously affected the treatment of pulmonary TB cases in East Java, Indonesia by increasing the incidence rate and decreasing the fatality rate. The pandemic promotes fear in the community to check their medical status and improve the quality of their health in East Java. © The Authors retain the copyrights of this article, with first publication rights granted to Medsci Publications.
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According to the World Health Organization, Tuberculosis (TB) is the second leading cause of death by a single infectious disease behind COVID-19. Despite a century of effort, the current TB vaccine does not effectively prevent pulmonary TB, promote herd immunity, or prevent transmission. Therefore, we seek to develop a genetic prophylaxis for TB. We have determined D-cycloserine to be the optimal target for this approach due to its relatively short six-enzyme biosynthetic pathway. D-CS is a second-line antibiotic for TB that inhibits bacterial cell wall synthesis. The first committed step towards D-CS synthesis is catalyzed by the L-serine-O-acetyltransferase (DcsE) which converts L-serine and acetyl-CoA to O-acetyl-L-serine (L-OAS). To test if the D-CS pathway could be an effective prophylaxis for TB in human cells, we endeavored to express DcsE in human cells and test its functionality. We overexpressed DcsE tagged with FLAG and GFP in A549 lung cancer cells as determined using fluorescence microscopy. We observed that purified DcsE catalyzed the synthesis of L-OAS as observed by HPLC-MS. Therefore, DcsE synthesized in human cells is a functional enzyme capable of converting L-serine and acetyl-CoA to L-OAS demonstrating the first step towards DCS production in human cells.Copyright © 2023 The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.
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Humankind is facing another deadliest pandemic of all times in history, caused by COVID-19. Apart from this challenging pandemic, World Health Organization (WHO) considers tuberculosis (TB) as a preeminent infectious disease due to its high infection rate. Generally, both TB and COVID-19 severely affect the lungs, thus hardening the job of medical practitioners who can often misidentify these diseases in the current situation. Therefore, the time of need calls for an immediate and meticulous automatic diagnostic tool that can accurately discriminate both diseases. As one of the preliminary smart health systems that examine three clinical states (COVID-19, TB, and normal cases), this study proposes an amalgam of image filtering, data-augmentation technique, transfer learning-based approach, and advanced deep-learning classifiers to effectively segregate these diseases. It first employed a generative adversarial network (GAN) and Crimmins speckle removal filter on X-ray images to overcome the issue of limited data and noise. Each pre-processed image is then converted into red, green, and blue (RGB) and Commission Internationale de l'Elcairage (CIE) color spaces from which deep fused features are formed by extracting relevant features using DenseNet121 and ResNet50. Each feature extractor extracts 1000 most useful features which are then fused and finally fed to two variants of recurrent neural network (RNN) classifiers for precise discrimination of three-clinical states. Comparative analysis showed that the proposed Bi-directional long-short-term-memory (Bi-LSTM) model dominated the long-short-term-memory (LSTM) network by attaining an overall accuracy of 98.22% for the three-class classification task, whereas LSTM hardly achieved 94.22% accuracy on the test dataset.
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Today it is observed that few people respect the biosecurity measures announced by the WHO, which aimed to reduce the amount of COVID-19 infection among people, even knowing that this virus has not disappeared from our environment, being an unprecedented infection in the world. It should be noted that before this pandemic, tuberculosis affected millions of people, having a great role because it is highly contagious and directly affects the lungs, although it has a cure, if it is not treated in time it can be fatal for the person, although there are many methods of detection of tuberculosis, one that is most often used is the diagnosis by chest x-ray, although it has low specificity, when the image processing technique is applied, tuberculosis would be accurately detected. In view of this problem, in this article a chest X-ray image processing system was conducted for the early detection of tuberculosis, helping doctors to detect tuberculosis accurately and quickly by having a second opinion by the system in the analysis of the chest x-ray, prevents fatal infections in patients. Through the development of the tuberculosis early detection system, it was possible to observe the correct functioning of the system with an efficiency of 97.84% in the detection of tuberculosis, detailing the characteristics presented by normal or abnormal images so that the doctor detects tuberculosis in the patient early. © 2023 IEEE.
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Oesophageal involvement due to tuberculosis (TB) and coinfection with HTLV-1 is rare and can be complicated by the presence of other infections that affect the mucosa of the upper respiratory tract, such as COVID-19. We present the case of a 27-year-old male patient, with 3 months of illness, weight loss, dysphagia, and ulcers in the oral cavity. Tomography showed oesophageal perforation and after oesophageal ulcer biopsy, TB was diagnosed, in addition to infection by HTLV-1 and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2). The patient responded satisfactorily to antituberculous treatment and corticosteroids. Considering the association between rare extrapulmonary tuberculosis and other immunosuppressive pathologies, it is crucial to identify these pathologies in such patients.
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Experimental research with animals can help the prevention, cure, and alleviation of human ailments. Animal research facilities are critical for scientific advancement, but they can also pose a higher risk than other biomedical laboratories. Zoonosis, allergic reactions, bites, cuts, and scratches by animals are all substantial concerns that can occur in animal facilities. Furthermore, human error and unexpected animal behavior pose a risk not just to humans, but also to the environment and the animals themselves. The majority of biosafety and biosecurity training programs focus on clinical and biomedical laboratories dealing with human safety factors, with little emphasis on animal biosafety. The current virtual training was designed to improve biosafety and biosecurity capabilities of animal laboratory personnel, researchers, and veterinarians from different regions of Pakistan. The results revealed that understanding was improved regarding triggers for risk assessment in addition to annual and regular reviews (56% to 69%), biosecurity (21% to 50%), decontamination (17% to 35%), safe handling of sharps (21% to 35%), Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) (17% to 40%), Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) usage by waste handlers (60.9% to 75%), waste management (56% to 85%), animal biosafety levels (40.57% to 45%), and good microbiological practices and procedures (17% to 35%). To bring human and animal laboratories up to the same level in terms of biosafety and biosecurity, it is critical to focus on areas that have been overlooked in the past. Training programs focusing on animal biosafety should be conducted more frequently to strengthen bio risk management systems in animal research facilities.Copyright © 2021
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Tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) are historically significant cases of infectious disease outbreaks that have posed economic, social, reputational, and moral challenges to Singapore and its much-vaunted model. Until only in recent years, Singapore's neoliberal public health system—focused on efficiency and optimal allocation—had neglected HIV/AIDS and thus the segments of society often associated with it. This neglect had been heightened by prevailing social stigmas and stereotypes. This may shed some light on the COVID-19 pandemic, which elicited rapid, responsive, robust, and inclusive government action where mainstream Singaporean community was concerned, but at the same time failed to recognize and deal with the marginalized and possibly stigmatized segments of society, such as migrant workers, whose badly infected dormitories became an international spectacle of crisis and social injustice. COVID-19 resembled tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in terms of social stigmatization and even moral panic over the unhealthy elements in society. This resulted in the othering of—and disproportionate concern and hostility towards— teenage "spitters” who threatened to spread tuberculosis through their "defiant” behaviour, homosexuals who threatened to spread HIV/AIDS through their "immoral” behaviour and migrant workers in dormitories who were the foreign bringers of disease. The SARS crisis in 2003 was a "wake-up call” for a less-than-prepared Singapore. A subsequently more proactive government learnt key lessons from the crisis, which were systematically institutionalized in readiness for the next infectious disease outbreak. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
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9870 thousand people develop tuberculosis (TB) in 2020. Despite being a preventable as well as curable communicable disease, tuberculosis still is the leading communicable disease killer globally. The WHO's End TB Strategy envisions a world free of TB, zero deaths, disease, and suffering due to tuberculosis by 2035. China ranks second for TB cases globally. Over the past 20 years, China has made remarkable achievements in tuberculosis control, with the prevalence and mortality rate of tuberculosis reduced by half compared with 1990. China has achieved the United Nations Millennium Development Goals on tuberculosis control 5 years ahead of schedule. However, in spite of concerted international, regional, and national efforts to address tuberculosis in China, the tuberculosis burden in China is still high. At the same time, China also faces problems such as the high burden of latent TB infection, rifampicin-resistant/ multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, and low detection rate of tuberculosis. China needs to further improve the quality of tuberculosis control work to reduce the incidence of tuberculosis and ultimately achieve the goal of ending tuberculosis. © People's Medical Publishing House, PR of China 2022.
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As tuberculosis (TB) patients do not have lifetime immunity, environmental transmission is one of the key reasons why TB has not been entirely eradicated. In this study, an SVEIRB model of recurrent TB considering environmental transmission was developed to explore the transmission kinetics of recurrent TB in the setting of environmental transmission, exogenous infection, and prophylaxis. A more thorough explanation of the effect of environmental transmission on recurrent TB can be found in the model's underlying regeneration numbers. The global stability of disease-free and local equilibrium points can be discussed by looking at the relevant characteristic equations. The Lyapunov functions and the LaSalle invariance principle are used to show that the local equilibrium point is globally stable, and TB will persist if the basic reproduction number is larger. Conversely, the disease will disappear if the basic reproduction number is less than one. The impact of environmental transmission on the spread of tuberculosis was further demonstrated by numerical simulations, which also demonstrated that vaccination and reducing the presence of the virus in the environment are both efficient approaches to control the disease's spread.
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Relevance. At present, three infections – HIV infection, tuberculosis, and COVID-19-are spreading simultaneously in the world. Of great practical importance is the assessment of clinical and epidemiological features of COVID-19 in HIV-infected patients with tuberculosis, COVID-19. Aim. To study the risk of COVID-19 disease and identify clinical and epidemiological features in and population of patients with HIV infection complicated by tuberculosis in comparison with patients with HIV infection and the population without these diseases. Materials and methods. Since 13.03.2020 by 31.12.2021 in the Kemerovo Region-Kuzbass, a continuous prospective analytical epidemiological study of the case-control type was performed. Of those with COVID-19, two observation groups were formed: group I (HIV +), group II (HIV/TB) and comparison group III (persons without either HIV or tuberculosis). All patients underwent: determination of SARS-CoV-2 RNA, standard examination methods in accordance with the temporary methodological recommendations «Prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a new coronavirus infection (COVID-19)», relevant at the time of treatment. Results. The incidence of COVID-19 among patients with HIV infection complicated by tuberculosis exceeded the incidence of COVID-19 among HIV-infected by 14%. There were no gender differences between patients I (HIV +) and II (HIV/TB) groups. In the comparison group, the incidence of COVID-19 was 1.26 times higher in women compared to men. COVID-19 disease in patients with co-infection (HIV/TB) was predominantly mild. Viral pneumonia developed 1.86 times less often, oxygenotherapy was required only in 18.75% of cases, which is 2.5 times lower than in group I (HIV +) and 2.47 times less than in the comparison group (III). In labeled pairs, clinical symptoms of COVID-19 in all groups occurred with the same frequency. Metabolic disorders were evident in all groups. Co-infected patients (HIV/TB) had higher levels of D-dimer, ESR, total bilirubin. Conclusion. Active tuberculosis in HIV-infected people is a factor that increases the risk of COVID-19 disease without affecting the severity of the infectious process. © 2023, Numikom. All rights reserved.
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Respiratory system bears the major brunt of environmental insults. Respiratory infections such as pneumonias continue to threaten human health. The corona virus pandemic (COVID-19) is the most recent example of a respiratory infection threatening the human kind. Tuberculosis is one of the most ancient diseases which continue to pose as a clinical problem. Besides infections, there is a huge burden of chronic respiratory disorders in terms of morbidity and mortality. Chronic respiratory disease (CRD) is among the most common non-communicable diseases (NCDs) identified by the World Health Organization. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is the third most common cause of death the world over. Respiratory allergies such as bronchial asthma, environmental, occupational and other interstitial lung diseases are other common chronic lung diseases which are increasing in incidence. Several new diagnostic and treatment modalities have been added in our armamentarium to fight against these disorders. Besides the medical and surgical treatments, some of these interventions are non-pharmacological in nature such as the pulmonary rehabilitation and patient education programmes. Newer strategies and governmental programmes constitute other important steps to control the disease-burden. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
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The heart, liver, lungs, brain and kidney are the five most highly perfused organs. Incidentally, they are the ones prone to many diseases and disorders. There has been a phenomenal rise in lung diseases in the recent past which can be attributed to rising levels of environmental pollution, smoking and other lifestyle problems. The cytokine storm experienced in the COVID-19-affected population was a recent challenge faced by physicians around the globe. Scientists have tried different methods and delivery systems for effective delivery of drugs to the lungs. Pectin-based drug delivery systems have also been tried and tested suc- cessfully. This chapter will focus on the bumps and humps in the use of pectin as an effective polymer in delivering therapeutics to the lungs and management of various respiratory disorders. © The Author (s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023.
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This clinical case shows a patient who was admitted to the Hospital Regional Antofagasta (HRA) due to pneumonia associated with COVID-19, coinfected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and who consequently developed Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) in a Catastrophic condition, which warranted Sequential management that began with airway rescue at the hospital of origin (Barros Luco Trudeau (HBLT)) with mechanical ventilation support, in prone condition with poor results. Upon arrival of the transfer team, Extracorporeal Membrane Cannulation (ECMO) was decided. After his favorable response, he was weaned to the artificial respirator (RA) and supported with Arteriovenous CO2 remover (NovalungR ), a maneuver that lasted 192 hours, achieving improvement from Mechanical Ventilation support, until his final weaning. This is an unprecedented clinical case, due to the combination of catastrophic ARDS, associated with the COVID 19 and TB coinfection, and for this reason it is necessary to document cases, guide behaviors and management, which can be adapted according to the technological and professional development with which count each hospital.
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INTRO: Viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, are constantly changing. These genetic changes (aka mutations) occur over time and can lead to the emergence of new variants that may have different characteristics. After the first SARS-CoV-2 genome was published in early 2020, scientists all over the world soon realized the immediate need to obtain as much genetic information from as many strains as possible. However, understanding the functional significance of the mutations harbored by a variant is important to assess its impact on transmissibility, disease severity, immune escape, and the effectiveness of vaccines and therapeutics. METHODS: Here in Canada, we have developed an interactive framework for visualizing and reporting mutations in SARS-CoV-2 variants. This framework is composed of three stand-alone yet connected components;an interactive visualization (COVID-MVP), a manually curated functional annotation database (pokay), and a genomic analysis workflow (nf-ncov-voc). Findings: COVID-MVP provides (i) an interactive heatmap to visualize and compare mutations in SARS-CoV-2 lineages classified across different VOCs, VOIs, and VUMs;(ii) mutation profiles including the type, impact, and contextual information;(iii) annotation of biological impacts for mutations where functional data is available in the literature;(iv) summarized information for each variant and/or lineage in the form of a surveillance report;and (v) the ability to upload raw genomic sequence(s) for rapid processing and annotating for real-time classification. DISCUSSION: This comprehensive comparison allows microbiologists and public health practitioners to better predict how the mutations in emerging variants will impact factors such as infection severity, vaccine resistance, hospitalization rates, etc. CONCLUSION: This framework is cloud-compatible & standalone, which makes it easier to integrate into other genomic surveillance tools as well. COVID-MVP is integrated into the Canadian VirusSeq data portal (https://virusseqdataportal.ca) - a national data hub for SARS-COV-2 genomic data. COVID-MVP is also used by the CanCOGeN and CoVaRR networks in national COVID-19 genomic surveillance.
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The deadly complication Scientists failed to find evidence that COVID-19 causes a "cytokine storm” leading to death in patients with COVID-19 but they did find that secondary bacterial pneumonia that does not resolve was a key driver of death in patients with COVID-19 and may have exceeded death rates from the viral infection itself. The approach grouped similar ICU patient-days into clinical states based on electronic health record data and allowed the scientists to discover how complications such as bacterial pneumonia impacted the course of illness. For more on complications in COVID19 see J Clin Investig 2023;published online April 27. https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI170682 For more on efficacious monoclonal antibodies see Ann Intern Med 2023;published online April 18. https://doi.org/10.7326/M22-3428 For more on targets for herpes virus see Sci Adv 2023;9: eadf3977 For more on an RSV vaccine in pregnancy see N Engl J Med 2023;388: 1451–64 For more on Pillar[5]arene see Nat Commun 2023;14: 2141 For more on doxycycline for STIs see N Engl J Med 2023;388: 1296–306 For more on immunity in tuberculosis see Nat Immunol 2023;24: 753–54