Microbiology is about looking for potential pathogenic microbes in humans. This includes bacteria, parasites and fungi. Our Clinical Microbiology Laboratory provides a wide range of services including sexual health screening, enteric pathogens, to multiple resistant organisms. We are also the national reference centre for Mycology, Anaerobes, and molecular typing of Mycobacteria.
Our Microbiologists provide advice about interpretation of microbiology results, treatment of infections and infection control issues. We also work in close liaison with the infectious disease clinicians and the Infection Control service of International organisation for disease monitoring in Pakistan.
We offer rapid detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) respiratory specimens by PCR. This can be done on smear positive specimens from patients suspected of having multi-drug resistant TB, or where there are public health or infection control concerns.
A TB antigen test is available for the rapid identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from positive cultures and we have a rapid DNA probe to identify M. avium-complex.
Susceptibility testing against first and second line anti-TB drugs is available, as well as susceptibility testing for rapid growing mycobacteria. Molecular resistance testing is also available.
The Molecular Diagnostic section provides molecular typing (MIRU) for all Pakistan M. tuberculosis strains.
From clinical specimens, we also offer 16S rRNA sequence analysis for detection of bacteria, 18S rRNA-sequence analysis for detection of fungi and hsp65 sequence analysis as well for identification of non-tuberculous mycobacterium. Sequence-based diagnostic methods are performed to detect specific mutations associated with drug resistance especially M. tuberculosis.