Fragmento

To be very honest, few people care about bacterial morphology. This is very unfortunate, because the subject of morphology addresses a fundamental biological question, the significance of which has been decided by the organisms themselves. A simple way to verify this is to take a look at the cultures of M. tuberculosis under different condition inside and outside the host. They become shorter in older cultures, filamentous within macrophages, and ovoid during starvation. These morphological changes are examples in which cell shape is implicated but not yet proven to be important. Based on World Health Organization (WHO) data, there are 8 million active cases of tuberculosis (TB) with 3 million deaths per year. In addition, about one third of the global population is estimated to suffer fron latent tuberculosis [4]. This high number of cases may not only reflect the poor implementation of TB control programs, but it may also represent our failure to understand the basic biology of M. tuberculosis.

Palabras clave: M. tuberculosis morphology XXDR-TB latent TB.

2012-03-14   |   395 visitas   |   Evalua este artículo 0 valoraciones

Vol. 6 Núm.1. Enero 2012 Pags. 97-99 J Infect Developing Countries 2012; 6(1)