Fatima Khan

• MD Microbiology
• Professor (Assistant) at JNMCH, AMU

Background: Mapping the local etiology and susceptibility of common pathogens causing complicated urinary tract infection (cUTI) is important for promoting evidence-based antimicrobial prescribing. Evaluating the prevalence of extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL), AmpC beta-lactamase (AmpC), and carbapenemase-producing Enterobacterales (CPEs) is...

Background: Infection prevention and control practices are critical in healthcare to reduce healthcare-associated infections (HAIs). In low-resource settings, limited trained personnel impede effective implementation. This study assessed a peer tutoring program in which nursing staff trained their peers in infection prevention and control. Method:...

This study examines the evolution of bacterial meningitis etiology and antimicrobial resistance patterns over 20 years at a tertiary care centre in Aligarh, India. Comparing two periods (2001-2009 and 2015-2021), we identified a shift from gram-positive to gram-negative bacteria as the primary pathogens, with Staphylococcus aureus decreasing from 3...

Objectives Knowledge of local antibiotic susceptibility rates is essential to strengthen antimicrobial stewardship programs. DASH to Protect Antibiotics (https://dashuti.com/), promotes the dissemination of focused local antibiograms in community urinary tract infection (UTI). This study mapped the susceptibility profile of Klebsiella pneumoniae fr...

Background: Mapping the local etiology and antimicrobial susceptibility profile of pathogens causing complicated urinary tract infection (cUTI) is important for promoting evidence based antimicrobial prescribing. WGS plays an important role in genomic surveillance of AMR and understanding circulating clades. Methods: Antimicrobial susceptibility pr...

Whole genome sequencing (WGS) has the potential to greatly enhance AMR (Anti-microbial Resistance) surveillance. To characterize the prevalent pathogens and dissemination of various AMR-genes, 73 clinical isolates were obtained from blood and respiratory tract specimens, were characterized phenotypically by VITEK-2 (bioMerieux), and 23 selected iso...

This is a multicentric mentorship programme guiding Indian hospitals in preparing, analysing and dissemination of antibiogram to promote stewardship practice

Objectives Evidence-based prescribing is essential to optimize patient outcomes in cystitis. This requires knowledge of local antibiotic resistance rates. Diagnostic and Antimicrobial Stewardship (DASH) to Protect Antibiotics (https://dashuti.com/) is a multicentric mentorship program guiding centers in preparing, analyzing and disseminating local...

Purpose. Asymptomatic bacteriuria (ASB) is a common finding during pregnancy. Effective antibiotic treatment could reduce its adverse effects on both mother and fetus. However, emerging antimicrobial resistance limits the treatment options. Fosfomycin might be a promising drug in this regard, as its resistance is still low. The aim of the study was...

Purpose: Asymptomatic bacteriuria (ASB) is a common finding during pregnancy. Effective antibiotic treatment could reduce its adverse effects on both mother and fetus. However, emerging antimicrobial resistance limits the treatment options. Fosfomycin might be a promising drug in this regard, as its resistance is still low. The aim of the study was...

Purpose: Asymptomatic bacteriuria (ASB) is a common finding during pregnancy. Effective antibiotic treatment could reduce its adverse effects on both mother and fetus. However, emerging antimicrobial resistance limits the treatment options. Fosfomycin might be a promising drug in this regard, as its resistance is still low. The aim of the study was...

Background An early and effective immune response has a role in disease presentation and clearance of pathogen. Chemokine and cytokine responses in the immunopathogenesis of scrub typhus (ST) are the least explored aspect. This study aimed to analyze interleukin (IL)-2, IL-6, tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), IL-10, transforming growth factor (T...

Bloodstream infections (BSIs) are one of the most frequent infections and a potentially lethal condition with a case fatality rate of 20-50%. The present study was done to determine the prevalence and antimicrobial resistance pattern of gram-negative bacteria in blood stream infections (BSI) in a tertiary care center in Northern India. Methods-This...

Klebsiella pneumoniae is one of the common cause of nosocomial outbreak. With the emergence of multi-drug resistance, clinical management has become a serious challenge. The present study is a comparative analysis of changing trends of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) between two outbreaks of Klebsiella pneumoniae in PICU occurring over a gap of 8 ye...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has emerged as one of the leading public health threats of the 21st century. The clinical microbiology reporting of culture and antimicrobial susceptibility test, if communicated and understood correctly, may lead to effective treatment without increasing the AMR burden. This questionnaire-based study was conducted to...

Purpose Asymptomatic bacteriuria is a common finding during pregnancy. Effective antibiotic treatment could reduce its adverse effects during pregnancy. However, antimicrobial resistance limits the treatment options. Fosfomycin might be a promising drug in this regard, as its resistance is still low. The aim of the study was to determine the antimi...

Surgical antibiotic prophylaxis (SAP) prevents infectious complications during surgery by administering an effective antimicrobial agent before surgery. There is, however, lack of adherence to the standard SAP administration protocol. We reviewed 576 surgeries and find that cefuroxime/cefazolin was used as SAP in less than 31% of surgeries followed...

Human monkeypox (now termed as the “Mpox”) was considered a geographically isolated disease until recently, but the current spread of the disease over 110 locations around the world has created an environment of fear. This study was thus conducted to evaluate the knowledge and apprehensions about the ongoing outbreak of Monkeypox among the medical...

Emerging and re-emerging zoonoses of diverse etiologies have caused significant morbidity and mortality recently. In the past two decades, several viral zoonoses, such as Bird flu, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, Hantavirus infection, Nipah virus disease, Rift Valley fever, Swine flu, West Nile fever, SARS, MERS, COVID-19 etc., have emerged from different...

Introduction: Hand Hygiene is the cheapest, easiest and the single most effective measure to reduce cross-transmission of infection from one patient to another and from the healthcare workers to patients and vice versa. Multiple studies have shown a decrease in healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) rates after improvement in hand-hygiene complia...

Introduction: Hand Hygiene is the cheapest, easiest and the single most effective measure to reduce cross-transmission of infection from one patient to another and from the healthcare workers to patients and vice versa. Multiple studies have shown a decrease in healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) rates after improvement in hand-hygiene complia...

Scrub typhus is a re-emerging zoonotic rickettsial disease and is prevalent in many parts of India. Scrub typhus in Uttar Pradesh is virtually unknown but has shown emergence in recent reports. In this context, a prospective study was planned to analyze the prevalence and clinic-epidemiological parameters of scrub typhus in febrile patients present...

Introduction: Brucellosis is a significant but lesser-known cause of pyrexia of unknown origin (PUO) in India. Studies documenting the prevalence of Brucellosis in different parts of India are sparse and few. Clinicians thus usually don’t consider it in their differential diagnosis. This study assesses its prevalence in two groups: febrile patients...

India is home to more than one quarter of the world's TB burden, and has reported 24.04 lakh new Tuberculosis cases in the year 2019. This number was before the pandemic struck whereas Tuberculosis notication rates fell by 25% during the period of January-June 2020 compared with the same period in 2019. To curb the spread of COVID-19, India announ...

BACKGROUND: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) can spread via a cough or respiratory droplets, contact with bodily fluids, or from contaminated surfaces. Aerosol-generating procedures, such as noninvasive ventilation, high-flow nasal cannula, bag-mask ventilation, and intubation are of particularly high risk. Standard precautions, including strict hand...

Context Globally, the reporting on the incidents of needle stick injuries (NSI) is far below the actual, and in hospitals which depend on their normal reporting systems, this figure may be up to ten times lower. NSIs can serve as a source of life-threatening infections; therefore, an insight into various factors that lead to it, along with the know...

Context India generates around 3 million tonnes of medical wastes every year, an amount that is expected to grow at 8% annually. Improper handling of biomedical waste (BMW) can result in the spread of infections such as HIV-acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, hepatitis B virus and hepatitis C virus in addition to being a burden on the environment....

Purpose Carbapenem inactivation method (CIM) and modified carbapenem inactivation method (mCIM) were recently developed for rapid detection of carbapenemase producing Gram negative bacilli (CP-GNB). In this study we compared the ability of modified Hodge test (MHT), CIM and mCIM to identify CP-GNB in Oman and India. Methods Fifty fully characteriz...

Introduction Surgical antimicrobial prophylaxis (SAP) is considered vital for reducing surgical site infection, however, if inappropriate, it prolongs the hospital stay of patients, increases morbidity, promotes antimicrobial resistance and puts an economic burden on the health system. This study was carried out to assess the knowledge and complian...

Background: Surgical antimicrobial prophylaxis (SAP) refers to the utilization of antibiotic agents for the prevention of surgical site infections (SSI), to prevent SSI-associated morbidity and mortality, reduce duration and cost of healthcare, and cause minimal adverse drug effects. The adherence rate among surgeons for the available international...

Urinary tract infections (UTI) are one of the most common community acquired infections and can also present with similar lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS). Moreover, UTI can be a complication of these urological diseases. Thus, this study was conducted in patients with LUTS to find out the prevalence of uro-pathogens and their antibiotic suscept...

Background: Urinary tract infection (UTI) is one of the most common bacterial infections, affecting 150 million people each year worldwide with substantial clinical and financial burden. With upcoming multi drug resistance (MDR) and carbepenem resistance among uropathogens there is urgent need to explore other new or old treatment options like nitr...

Leptospirosis is identified as an important reemerging zoonotic disease distributed worldwide, caused by Leptospira. This study was carried out to explore the genetic characterization and its phylogenetic analysis of circulating Leptospira species, among the Aligarh region of western Uttar Pradesh in India, utilizing secY gene-based nucleotide sequ...

Abstract Introduction: The increasing prevalence of the multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria and the lack of new antibiotics to combat them have led to rekindled interest in colistin, a bactericidal antibiotic that was used in the 1960s for treatment of infections caused by Gram-negative bacilli. Colistin is used as a salvage therapy for mult...

Background: Scrub typhus is lesser known cause of fever of unknown origin in India. Even if there have been reports documenting the prevalence of scrub typhus in different parts of India, it is still an unknown entity, and clinicians usually do not consider it as differential diagnosis. The present study was performed to document the prevalence of...

Introduction: Urinary tract infection (UTI) continues to be the most common infection diagnosed in outpatients as well as in hospitalized patients. Citrobacter spp. is an emerging urinary pathogen. The present study assessed the prevalence and antibiotic sensitivity pattern of Citrobacter spp. in patients admitted to or attending outpatient departm...

Background & Objectives: Early and accurate diagnosis of leptospirosis is important for proper and prompt treatment, which is life saving for patients with severe illness. IgM ELISA is particularly useful in making an early diagnosis, since it is positive in the first week of illness, a time when the clinical manifestations may be nonspecific. This...

Introduction: Klebsiella pneumoniae is a ubiquitous environmental organism and a common cause of serious gram-negative infections in humans. This study was conducted to examine the association between seasonal variation and the incidence rate of Klebsiella pneumoniae blood stream infection. Material and methods: The retrospective study was conducte...

Please cite this article as: Akhtar A et al., Comparative evaluation of Blood culture, Immunochromatographic test, Widal and Polymerase chain reaction for rapid diagnosis of Enteric fever. ABSTRACT Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi, the human-specific, causative agent of typhoid fever, causes an estimated 21 million new cases and 216,000 deaths eve...

Empathy, compassion and kindness are some of the virtues that often get ignored amidst the tough study schedule, through the entire professional course. This is where a medical student loses those virtues and compassion for humanity that on the first instance obligated him to join this stream of medicine, despite the odds. The medical humanities ca...

Introduction: Erythromycin resistant Staphylococcus isolates with inducible resistance appear sensitive to clindamycin in in?vitro sensitivity testing. If clindamycin is used for treatment of such isolates, selection for constitutive mutants may lead to clinical failure. Current study was conducted to detect the presence of inducible clindamycin re...

Leptospirosis is one of the most common zoonotic diseases that are potentially fatal but it is quite under-diagnosed and under-reported. However, acute necrotizing pancreatitis, which is usually associated with high mortality rate, is a rare complication of leptospirosis. This is a report of leptospirosis case presenting with acute pancreatitis. A...

CONS isolated from blood culture are usually contaminants but are also a significant cause of bacteremia. False positive blood culture leads to additional laboratory tests, unnecessary antibiotic use and longer hospitalization of patients that increases the patients care costs. This study was done to assess the role of CONS in blood culture in rela...

Urinary tract infection (UTI) is one of the most common infectious diseases in clinical practice. The choice of antibiotics for the treatment of UTI is limited by the rising rates of antibiotic resistance. There is an urgent need to discover new effective treatment solutions. Fosfomycin may be an interesting alternative to the currently used treatm...

With the emergence of metallo-betalactamases (MBL) in Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa), the value of carbapenem, the drug of last resort, is being severely compromised. Curtailing the use of carbapenems becomes paramount if resistance is to be reined in. To study the role of synergy between combinations of drugs as an alternative treatment ch...

Introduction: Urinary tract infection (UTI) is a common cause of morbidity in patients attending our hospital. Recently UTI has become more complicated and difficult to treat because of appearance of pathogens with increasing resistance to the commonly used antimicrobial agents. Objectives: The main aim of the study was to determine the bacteriolog...

Antibacterial-resistant pathogens are serious threat worldwide. The presence of drug-resistant bacteria in environmental samples has important implications for people living in the area who are reliant on public water and sanitation facilities. Detection of faecal indicator bacteria in water provides a very sensitive method of quality assessment. T...

Background: Chronic Suppurative Otitis Media (CSOM) is an important cause of preventable hearing loss. Global emergence of resistant strains is of great concern. The aim of the present study was t o determine the etiology and antibiotic sensitivity pattern of bacterial isolates from CSOM cases with special emphasis on ESBL (Extended Spectrum Beta-...

To study the prevalence and antimicrobial susceptibility profiles of candida species isolated from blood for a period of 5 months. Only a few studies from India have reported candidaemia rates of 6-18 per cent and an increase in isolation of non-albicans Candida species from blood samples. But speciation and susceptibility testing of Candida is sti...

Introduction: Urinary tract infection (UTI) is a common cause of morbidity in patients attending our hospital. Recently UTI has become more complicated and difficult to treat because of appearance of pathogens with increasing resistance to the commonly used antimicrobial agents. Objectives: The main aim of the study was to determine the bacteriolog...

Objective: To evaluate the role of Toxoplasma gondii in women with bad obstetric (BOH) history and in women with primary and secondary infertility. Methods: This study was conducted in the Department of Microbiology, Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College and Hospital for a period of 5 years from January 2004 to December 2009. Quantitative determination...

Background: Etiology of nearly 30% cases of chronic viral hepatitis remains undetected. Occult HBV infection (OBI) has emerged as an important clinical entity in this scenario. Apart from prevalence and clinical outcome of OBI patients genotype was determined in northern region of India. Materials and methods: A total of 847 patients with chroni...

Background: Leptospirosis is the most widespread zoonosis occurring worldwide. Severity of disease may range from inapparent infection to fulminant, fatal disease. Besides, direct injury by microbial factors, cytokines produced in response to infection have been proposed to be involved in the pathogenesis of leptospirosis. Objective: This study was...

Objectives: There are concerns regarding the emergence of NDM-1 metallo-beta-lactamase in clinical and environmental bacteria; however, no attempts have yet been made for their molecular correlation. We analyzed antibiotics-resistant environmental and clinical isolates for bla genes, mobile genetic elements and for the epidemiological relationship...

Pulmonary Tuberculosis (TB) is a global public health threat. It has a worldwide distribution with a very high prevalence in Asian countries. A correct diagnosis forms an important and indispensable part of proper and timely treatment. Detection of acid fast bacilli in direct smears has considerable clinical and epidemiological value and remains th...

A prospective study was conducted to assess the role of coryneform bacteria in surgical site infections among obstetric and gynecological patients undergoing surgery. The surgery was graded according to the degree of contamination, and surgical site infections (SSIs) were classified as superficial or deep. Pus samples were collected from SSIs accor...

AIM: To study the role of IL-8, IL-10, IL-12, IFN-γ AND TNF-α in immunopathogenesis of HBV infection. METHODS: Eight hundred and forty consecutive patients with hepatitis were screened by serological markers for acute HBV (AHB) and were genotyped using modified Kirschberg’s method. Patients were graded clinically and biochemically. Serum IL-8, IL-1...

Multidrug resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a major nosocomial pathogen, and effective therapy presents a great clinical challenge. Combination therapy, employing pre-existing antibiotics, is an attractive approach for the treatment of such infections which may also curtail drug resistance. This study was undertaken with the objectives to assess...

Chikungunya is an emerging disease in North India. The disease typically presents as an acute illness with symptoms of fever, skin rash and incapacitating arthralgia. The modern lifestyles may amplify an epidemic through travel, population ageing, and production of solid waste that can shelter Aedes mosquito. Consecutive febrile patients were scree...

Staphylococcus aureus is known to cause both hospital and community acquired infections. Hospital acquired strains are usually multidrug resistant. Treatment of infection due to these organisms and their eradication is very difficult. Monitoring of these strains is essential in order to control their spread in the hospital environment and transmiss...

Coryneform species other than Corynebacterium diphtheriae are coming up as important pathogens with the potential to cause serious and life-threatening infections not only in immunocompromised but in immunocompetent individuals as well. The exact infectious potential of these bacteria and their rational antimicrobial treatment is a challenging but...

Urinary tract infections (UTI) are one of the most common medical complications of pregnancy. The emergence of drug resistance and particularly the Extended-spectrum beta-lactamase production by Escherichia coli and methicillin resistance in Staphylococci, limits the choice of antimicrobials. Patients in different stages of pregnancy with or withou...

The study was carried out to determine the prevalence of MRSA, VRSA and their current antimicrobial susceptibility pattern to various non-β-lactam antimicrobial agents to record the current status of MRSA response to commonly used antistaphylococcal antibiotics in Aligarh, India for a period of two years. A total of 430 Staphylococcus aureus strain...

Background: Acute bacterial meningitis is a medical emergency which warrants early diagnosis and aggressive therapy. It is important to know the regional bacterial etiology in semitropical countries like India along with their sensitivity profile to allow optimum management of such patients with least possible mortality. This study was undertaken t...

Staphylococcus aureus is a causative agent of many types of diseases throughout the world. Staphylococcal infections are of particular concern because of the causative bacteria offering resistance to a wide range of commonly used antibiotics. The formation of biofilm is the hallmark characteristic of S. aureus infection. Biofilms constitute reservo...

A simple algorithm is proposed for the identification of Enterobacteriaceae which routinely necessitates numerous biochemical tests and a prolonged time span [may extend upto 96 hours].This simple scheme is economical and time saving, reducing the turnaround time for identification of the pathogenic organisms to 24 hours, so that the final reports...

S.aureus is an important cause of nosocomial infections. It has overcome most of the therapeutic agents, of which the most important problem for the physicians and the microbiologists is the emergence of MRSA. In the present study, an effort has been made to detect and compare the efficacy of the cefoxitin disc diffusion test with other phenotypic...