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Three hundred (300) post-operative wound swab specimens were aseptically collected from four hospitals and investigated. The four hospitals were Federal Medical Centre, Makurdi (FMCM), General Hospital, Gboko (GHG), General Hospital, Otukpo (GHO) and General Hospital North Bank, Makurdi (GHNBM). The swabs were cultured and organisms identified according to standard procedures. A prevalence rate of bacterial isolates (56.7%) was obtained from the post-operative wound sites investigated. Pseudomonas aeruginosa was the most encountered pathogen with 20.3% prevalence rate followed by Staphylococcus aureus (13.0%), while 8.3% accounted for co-infection of both organisms. Other organisms encountered included Klebsiella spp. (4.0%), Escherichia coli (3.3%), atypical coliform (2.7%), and Proteus spp. (2.3%). Enterococcus faecalis and Streptococcus pyogenes had the least prevalent rate of 1.3% each. Statistically, Chi square analysis showed that there was no significant difference in the number of isolates from FMCM, GHQ, GHO and GHNBM and in the occurrence of both organisms in relation to sex (p˃0.05). The incidence of P. aeruginosa was highest (38.4%) at Federal Medical Centre, Makurdi, compared with other collection points investigated while that of Staphylococcus aureus was highest (37.5%) at FMCM compared with all other collection points' investigated. Antibiogram studies revealed that P. aeruginosa was most susceptible to levoxin to the magnitude of 98.4%. While P. aeruginosa was resistant to ampicillin, tetracycline and streptomycin, S. aureus was only resistant to tetracycline. The findings have revealed that nosocomial wound infections remain a menace in medical management of wounds.

Background: Malaria is an infectious disease caused by a protozoan parasite of the genus Plasmodium. It was estimated that 219 million cases of malaria occur in 87 countries, with an estimated death of 435,000 in 2017 among pregnant women. Other species include P. ovale, P. vivax, and P. malariae is a blood parasite of human and is one of the major public health burdens in developing countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is estimated that about 3.5 billion people globally and 450 million people are thought to be ill as a result of such infections, the majority being children. Aims: This study was aimed at comparing RDTs against microscopy in the detection of malaria parasite among pregnant women. Samples were collected and analyzed following cross-sectional comparative study design. It was conducted between Septembers to November 2019. Study Design: This was a cross-sectional, comparative study Place and Duration of Study: This study was conducted among patients attending Specialist Hospital Sokoto, Sokoto State, between March and November, 2019. Methodology: A total of 106 participants were enrolled for the study. Standard parasitological examination was carried out on blood samples using microscopy followed by Rapid Diagnostic test (RDTs). Results: Finding revealed, in this study, CareStart kit had sensitivity of 77.7%, specificity of 100s%. It is expected that any RDT used for malaria diagnosis should have a high sensitivity of 95% and specificity 97% (WHO, 2003); this is in contrast with the RDTs results in this study. The false negative (FN) Carestart and SD-Bioline kits in this study were 10% and 21%, respectively using microscopy as the gold standard due to lack of sensitivity of RDTs at low parsitaemia compared to microscopy. The false positive rate in this study for the Carestart and SD-Bioline kits are 0% and 0% respectively. Out of 106 patients screened, 35% and 24% tested positive for Plasmodiumfalciparum using Carestart and SD-Bioline RDTs respectively, while 45% were positive to malaria by microscopic examination. There was high prevalence of malaria parasite among age group 18-23 which is 42.2%. Conclusion: It can be concluded that using microscopy is more time consuming compared to RDTs due to the fact that the time taken to read the results for RDTs is within five minutes and that of microscopy is higher compared to RDTs. Over all prevalence of malaria by microscopy was 42.5% while the prevalence of malaria by Carestart and SD-bioline was 33% and 22.6% respectively. Conventional microscopy remains the gold standard compared to RDTs according to this study with the level of its sensitivity and specificity which is higher than RDTs.