Microbiological Profile of Pin Tract Infections due to External Fixators

Introduction: Pin tract infections are complications associated with external fixators. Proper diagnosis and treatment can prevent further complications related to the infection. There are limited numbers of studies on this infection and thus treatment is usually based on individual’s experience. Therefore, this study was undertaken to have a better understanding of pin tract infections and to help us establish a treatment protocol in the hospital. Aim: To determine the incidence of pin tract infections among all patients who have external fixators, to identify the causative agents and study their antibiotic sensitivity pattern. Materials and Methods: The present study was a crosssectional study which was conducted in a tertiary hospital for patients who had external fixators. After obtaining ethical clearance and informed consent from the patient, all patients were monitored and if there was clinical suspicion of infection, discharge/pus was collected from the infection site and processed in the microbiology laboratory as per standard laboratory protocol to isolate and identify the causative agent. Antimicrobial susceptibility using Kirby Bauer’s disc diffusion method. Statistical analysis was done by using Microsoft excel 2010. Results: It was found that out of the 30 patients included in the study, six patients showed clinical evidence of pin tract infections with male preponderance. The most common isolate was Acinetobacter baumanii followed by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Citrobacter koseri with variable antibiotic susceptibility pattern. Conclusion: Pin tract infection occurred in 20% of the patients. Early diagnosis and treatment prevents complications which further reduces the cost of treatment and the number of days of hospital stay

Tuberculosis: integrated studies for a complex disease 2050

Tuberculosis (TB) has been a disease for centuries with various challenges [1]. Like other places where challenges and opportunities come together, TB challenges were the inspiration for the scientific community to mobilize different groups for the purpose of interest. For example, with the emergence of drug resistance, there has been a huge volume of research on the discovery of new medicines and drug delivery methods and the repurposing of old drugs [2, 3]. Moreover, to enhance the capacity to detect TB cases, studies have sought diagnostics and biomarkers, with much hope recently expressed in the direction of point-of-care tests [4]. Despite all such efforts as being highlighted in 50 Chapters of this volume, we are still writing about TB and thinking about how to fight this old disease–implying that the problem of TB might be complex, so calling the need for an integrated science to deal with multiple dimensions in a simultaneous and effective manner. We are not the first one; there have been proposed integrated platform for TB research, integrated prevention services, integrated models for drug screening, integrated imaging protocol, integrated understanding of the disease pathogenesis, integrated control models, integrated mapping of the genome of the pathogen, etc. [5–12], to name some. These integrated jobs date back decades ago. So, a question arises: why is there a disease named TB yet? It might be due to the fact that this integration has happened to a scale that is not global, and so TB remains to be a problem, especially in resource-limited settings. Hope Tuberculosis: Integrated Studies for a Complex Disease helps to globalize the integrated science of TB.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio