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Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM): Microbiological, clinical and geographical distribution
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This article was originally published by Wolters Kluwer - Medknow and was migrated to Scientific Scholar after the change of Publisher.
It is indeed a good attempt by the authors to bring out a monograph on non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM), a topic that is not well taught in medical schools and the related research is still in early stages. National Tuberculosis (TB) Control Programmes in resource-limited settings do not have the required infrastructure including trained human resources and access to recent molecular tests for diagnosis, and often the diagnosis is missed and treated as drug-sensitive or drug-resistant TB.
This book is divided into 10 chapters ranging from the taxonomy of the genus Mycobacterium, different molecular tests to identify NTM, susceptibility testing, NTM diseases in humans, NTM lung diseases, radiological techniques to determine clinical presentation of NTM to the epidemiological distribution of NTM. Each chapter is further discussed in detail under various related topics. However, the details in the book should have been supported by a good number of tables, figures and flow diagrams.
The laboratory part of diagnosis is well written, especially the collection, transport, storage and processing of specimens. In addition, the description of various steps in order to avoid contamination is also well written but the clinical parts, both pulmonary and extrapulmonary, are rather weak. In fact, more number of tables should have been provided on the treatment aspect as well.
The authors could have briefly mentioned the old classifications of NTM (Runyon and Kubica) without getting into the lengthy details. Similarly, biochemical tests could also have been summed up concisely as these tests are no longer used widely for NTM identification. There should have been a subtopic on the pathobiology of NTM in human host immunopathogenesis.
Epidemiology is an important aspect, especially in view of NTM diversity in geographical distribution as well as organ involvement by NTM. This topic has been exhaustively covered in a separate chapter, especially information on environmental and clinical specimens. However, for a monograph of this nature, the description is heavily skewed towards redundancy. It would have been welcome to have more number of tables and figures on this topic at the cost of text space.
Overall, this monograph should find a place as a reference book in libraries of medical colleges, medical institutes, hospitals as well as for staff of national TB control programmes.
