Dear Colleagues!
I have come accross a practice of processing sputum specimen for
Mycobacteria which I would like to share with you:
In preparing the Kinyoun stain, the technician was instructed to do two
things:
first to open the container with the sputum specimen and try to "fish" an
especially big clump of puss and place it
on a glass slide. Decontamination\ NALC treatment of
remaining sputum followed, and after centrifugation another ca. 0.06 ml
of the pellet were pipetted on top of the
first (in the meantime dried out) spot.
As soon as this one was dry, Kinoun staining followed.
The argument has it, that doing it this way increases the sensitivity of
the Kinyoun stain.
Acid fast bacilli that might have been damaged through the decontamination
process will be
"compensated" for by the ones that remained intact in the pretreated
specimen. Has this ever been
proven for the NALC procedure?
This procedure (the "fishing") is exteremly messy and I wonder whether it
does the job.
Can anyone comment on the effectiveness of this procedure? is it worthwile
the mess and
danger we are exposing the staff in sending them out "fishing"?
Thanx
Y. Keness
