Abstract

Introduction

Leprosy or Hansen’s disease is a slowly progressive infection caused by Mycobacterium Leprae that mainly affects the skin and peripheral nerves and results in disabling deformities. Despite its low communicability, leprosy remains endemic among an estimated 10 to15 million people living in poor tropical countries.

As far as tropical countries like India are concerned, it is still one of the major problems of public health importance.

The immune response of patient and the density of bacteria in the lesion (bacterial index) determine the clinical manifestation and the infectivity of the disease. Accordingly the disease manifests as a spectrum beginning from lesions having low immunity and infectivity to those having high immunity and low infectivity^[1]. This clinicopathological spectrum determines the treatment regimen^[2,3].

Diagnosis of leprosy is by demonstration of lepra bacilli in slit skin smears and skin biopsies^[4,5]. Ziehl-neelsen (ZN) staining is the old and conventional method of detection of the organism in clinical specimens^[6]. FF staining is more sensitive than ZN method in detection of Mycobacterium leprae in tissue section, it is not free from flaws^[7,8]. The density of bacilli should be 1000 per cubic millimeter of the tissue to pick single bacilli in the section^[1]. The laborious search for the bacilli is tiresome leading to increased chances of false negativity, under diagnosis and under grading of the disease. Many studies have been done on fluorescent techniques in this direction but its impact on bacteriological index and thus the clinical grade has been lacking in literature^[7-9].

Aim

To compare the efficacy of auraminerhodamine stain with fitefaraco stain in diagnosing M.leprae in tissue sections.