Background: Legionella pneumophila (L. pneumophila) is gram-negative bacterium, which causes Legionnaires’ disease as well as Pontiac fever. Objective: To determine the frequency of Legionella pneumophila in pneumonic patients, to determine the clinical utility of diagnosing Legionella pneumonia by urinary antigen testing (LPUAT) in terms of sensitivity and specificity, to compares the results obtained from patients by urinary antigen test with q Real Time PCR (RT PCR) using serum samples and to determine the frequency of serogroup 1 and other serogroups of L. pneumophila. Methods: A total of 100 pneumonic patients (community acquired pneumonia) were enrolled in this study during a period between October 2016 to April 2017; 92 samples were collected from patients attended and admitted to Al-Imamein Al-Kadhimein Medical City and 8 samples from those in the (Center of Kidney Diseases and Transplantation) in the Medical City of Baghdad. All patients were under therapy with antibiotics. Serum and urine specimens were obtained from all patients; urine samples were processed for urinary antigen test (rapid test). Serum samples were collected and submitted to DNA extraction for detection of L. pneumophila mip gene by q RT PCR assay. Results: The percentage of L. pneumophila in two hospitals in Bagdad was 30%. Of these 26% was serogroup 1 detected by urinary antigen testing (UAT). In the other hand, 23% of samples were positive by q RT PCR based mip gene, of these 19 % were serogroup 1 and 4% were another serogroup. The sensitivity of UAT is high (P value < 0.001), which means statistically highly significance than q RT PCR. Conclusion: LPUAT is a rapid tool for early diagnosis of Legionella infection, which highlights the need of using this test in hospitals and health institutions and there is a high prevalence of L. pneumophila in Iraq that refer to the necessity of considering this microorganism point of view in future studies for detection and treatment in pneumonic patients. Keywords: L. pneumophila, mip gene, quantitative real time PCR, urinary antigen. Citation: Gauad SA, Abdulrahman TR, Muhamad AK, Jawad AA, Hassan JS. Clinical utility of urinary antigen test and molecular method for detection of Legionella pneumophila. Iraqi JMS. 2018; 16(2): 207-215. doi: 10.22578/IJMS.16.2.13
This paper aims to find new analytical closed-forms to the solutions of the nonhomogeneous functional differential equations of the nth order with finite and constants delays and various initial delay conditions in terms of elementary functions using Laplace transform method. As well as, the definition of dynamical systems for ordinary differential equations is used to introduce the definition of dynamical systems for delay differential equations which contain multiple delays with a discussion of their dynamical properties: The exponential stability and strong stability
Pure Cu (CZTSe) and Ag dopant CZTSe (CAZTSe) thin films with Ag content of 0.1 and 0.2 were fabricated on coring glass substrate at R.T with thickness of 800nm by thermal evaporation method. Comparison between the optical characteristics of pure Cu and Ag alloying thin films was done by measuring and analyzing the absorbance and transmittance spectra in the range of (400-1100)nm. Also, the effect of annealing temperature at 373K and 473K on these characteristics was studied. The results indicated that all films had high absorbance and low transmittance in visible region, and the direct bang gap of films decreases with increasing Ag content and annealing temperature. Optical parameters like extinction coefficientrefractive index, and
... Show MoreThe primary objective of the current paper is to suggest and implement effective computational methods (DECMs) to calculate analytic and approximate solutions to the nonlocal one-dimensional parabolic equation which is utilized to model specific real-world applications. The powerful and elegant methods that are used orthogonal basis functions to describe the solution as a double power series have been developed, namely the Bernstein, Legendre, Chebyshev, Hermite, and Bernoulli polynomials. Hence, a specified partial differential equation is reduced to a system of linear algebraic equations that can be solved by using Mathematica®12. The techniques of effective computational methods (DECMs) have been applied to solve some s
... Show MoreMH Hamzah, AF Abbas, International Journal of Early Childhood Special Education, 2022
This research develops a new method based on spectral indices and random forest classifier to detect paddy rice areas and then assess their distributions regarding to urban areas. The classification will be conducted on Landsat OLI images and Landsat OLI/Sentinel 1 SAR data. Consequently, developing a new spectral index by analyzing the relative importance of Landsat bands will be calculated by the random forest. The new spectral index has improved depending on the most three important bands, then two additional indices including the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and standardized difference built-up index (NDBI) have been used to extract paddy rice fields from the data. Several experiments being
... Show MoreSoil water use and water storage vary by vegetative management practices, and these practices affect land productivity and hydrologic processes. This study investigated the effects of agroforestry buffers (AB), grass buffers (GB), and biofuel crops (BC), relative to row crops (RC) on soil water use for a claypan soil in northern Missouri, USA. The experiment located at the Greenley Memorial Research Center included RC, AB, GB, and BC established in 1991, 1997, 1997, and 2012, respectively. Soil water reflectometer sensors installed at 5‐, 10‐, 20‐, and 40‐cm depths monitored soil water from April to November in 2017 and 2018. Results showed significant differences in weekly volumetric water content (VWC) among treatments for all fou
... Show More<p>Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) suffer from dynamic network environment and topological instability that caused by high mobility feature and varying vehicles density. Emerging 5G mobile technologies offer new opportunities to design improved VANET architecture for future intelligent transportation system. However, current software defined networking (SDN) based handover schemes face poor handover performance in VANET environment with notable issues in connection establishment and ongoing communication sessions. These poor connectivity and inflexibility challenges appear at high vehicles speed and high data rate services. Therefore, this paper proposes a flexible handover solution for VANET networks by integrating SDN and
... Show MoreThe current study aimed to adopt a method for inducing callus cells and regenerating the important common red bean using different types of growth regulators such as N6-benzylaminopurine (BAP), Naphthalene acetic acid (NAA), and Thidiazuron (TDZ). Different types of common bean pinto cultivar explants, such as internodes, cotyledons and roots, were inoculated on Murashige and Skoog medium (MS) provided with different combinations of plant growth regulators, including 1- BAP (5 mg/l) 2-BAP (4.5 mg/l) NAA (0.5 mg/l), 3- BAP (4.5 mg/l), and TDZ (0.1mg/l). Callus was initiated on MS culture medium supplied with 5 mg/l BAP for all explants (internodes, cotyledons, and roots) at 50, 20, and 10% respectively, while adding NAA with 0.5mg/l showed
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