Brucellosis, a common zoonosis, is under reported in India despite its endemicity and increased exposure to livestock among the population. This study was conducted to determine the clinical manifestations, antibiotic susceptibility pattern, treatment and outcome of culture confirmed brucellosis. Adult patients with culture confirmed brucellosis who presented to a large teaching hospital in South India between 2009 and 2015 were included. A diagnosis of brucellosis was confirmed on automated culture. Clinical profile, laboratory parameters, drug susceptibility, treatment and outcome were documented by reviewing the medical records. The cohort comprised of 22 patients with mean ± SD age of 42 ± 13 years. Twenty one (95.5%) was male. Thirteen (59%) patients were from rural area and risk of acquisition of brucellosis including occupational exposure or consumption of unpasteurized milk was evident in 16 (72.7%) patients. The mean duration of symptoms before presentation was 54.5 ± 52 days. The commonest clinical presentation was prolonged fever without a definite focus in 18 patients (82%), whereas 2 (9%) patients had osteoarticular involvement and one patient (4.5%) each had genital involvement and endocarditis. Eighteen patients (82%) with uncomplicated brucellosis were treated with aminoglycoside and doxycycline for 6 weeks. There was no relapse or mortality at 18 ± 9 months of follow up. Brucellosis in this cohort had acute or subacute presentation with prolonged fever and bacteremia. High index of clinical suspicion based on significant epidemiological history along with automated blood culture improves the efficiency of diagnosis. Cure with lack of relapse among these cases suggests a combination therapy with doxycycline and aminoglycoside is highly effective for the treatment.

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Background: Tuberculosis (TB) is a communicable disease for which an early diagnosis is essential to control the disease. The microscopy-based TB screening is the conventional method employed for TB identification in sputum smears. Fluorescence microscopy-based diagnosis provides improved sensitivity and benefits large number of TB burdened communities across the globe. Microscopic images are often corrupted by intensity variations because of inherent imperfections of the image formation process. This may result in false positives which is the potential shortcoming of fluorescence microscopy.Methods & Materials: The fluorescence-stained slides were prepared at South African National Health Laboratory Services, Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. The images (N=100) were captured using a camera in monochrome binning mode attached to a 20x objective fluorescence microscope of 0.5 numerical aperture. The camera (AxioCam HR) has a resolution of 4164 x 3120 with a pixel size 6.45 m (h) x 6.45 m (v).The illumination correction methods adopted in this work include surface fitting method, multiple regression method and bidirectional empirical mode decomposition. The results of illumination correction are validated using the image sharpness measures. This includes derivative-based, statistical, histogrambased and transform-based parameters.