Background and Objective:Escherichia Coli is the most common etiological agent of UTI and accounts for more then 100, 0000 hospitalization annually. The objective of this study was to investigate the antimicrobial activity of aqueous and ethanolic extracts of Prunella vulgaris against E. coli from urinary tract infection patients.Methods:Urine samples of forty four suspected patients from Tertiary Care Hospital Faisalabad were used in this study. Ethanolic and aqueous extracts of Prunella vulgris (PV), a medicinal plant was evaluated for its ability to inhibit the growth of 38 resistant isolates of Escherichia coli strains and compared to Ciprofloxacin, Ofloxacin, Cefixime and Tobramycin by well diffusion method. Minimum inhibitory concentration was measured by using broth micro dilution method.Results:PV showed antibacterial activity against Escherichia coli strains, however Tobramycin at 10 microgram (10μg) inhibited the resistant E. coli to a greater extent as compared to other antibiotics and was resistant to twice less number of strains, about 82% of E. coli isolates have MDR pattern.Conclusion:Ciprofloxacin has more efficacy than PV and no synergistic effect with extracts of PV. Cefixime is least efficacious against resistant E. coli, however it has synergistic effect with extracts of PV.

The re-emergence of virulent strains of the Infectious Bursal Disease Virus (IBDV) leads to significant economic losses of poultry industry in Pakistan during last few years. This disease causes the infection of bursa, which leads to major immune losses. A total number of 30 samples from five IBD outbreaks during the period of 2019–20 were collected from different areas of Faisalabad district, Pakistan and assayed by targeting the IBD virus VP2 region through RT-PCR. Among all the outbreaks, almost 80% of poultry birds were found positive for the IBDV. The bursa tissues were collected from the infected birds and histopathological examination of samples revealed severe lymphocytic depletion, infiltration of inflammatory cells, and necrosis of the bursa of Fabricius (BF). Positive samples were subjected to re-isolation and molecular characterization of IBDV. The Pakistan IBDV genes were subjected to DNA sequencing to determine the virus nucleotide sequences. The sequences of 100 Serotype-I IBDVs showing nearest homology were compared and identified with the study sequence. The construction of the phylogenetic tree for nucleotide sequences was accomplished by the neighbor-joining method in MEGA-6 with reference strains. The VP2 segment reassortment of IBDVs carrying segment A were identified as one important type of circulating strains in Pakistan. The findings indicated the molecular features of the Pakistan IBDV strains playing a role in the evolution of new strains of the virus, which will contribute to the vaccine selection and effective prevention of the disease.