Good clinical diagnostic practice: a guide for clinicians in developing countries to the clinical diagnosis of disease and to making proper use of clinical diagnostic services

Physicians in developing countries usually take a syndromic approach to diagnosing a patient. Today, we observe increasing microbial resistance to drugs, particularly in developing countries. This worsening situation puts a heavy obligation on medical professionals to improve their clinical diagnosis. Clinical diagnostic services provide more accurate information on a patient based on physical and biochemical investigations. However, in many countries there is little communication between the physicians and the laboratory and diagnostic imaging services. Occasionally, medical staff feel that diagnostic imaging and even more so laboratory services report results that are inappropriate or even erroneous. Consequently, the service provided by the laboratory is wasted, placing an unacceptable burden on the diagnostic services, which is of no benefit to the health service. This manual has been written to improve the clinical and diagnostic skills of physicians. The manual assumes that clinicians have been trained in history-taking, physical examination and use of laboratory investigations and also have access to basic clinical diagnostic equipment and to essential laboratory tests

Fluorescence microscopy for disease diagnosis and environmental monitoring

Fluorescence microscopy meets all the essential requirements for laboratory examination even under constrained conditions of work. Fluorescence microscopy has proved to be a useful and very cost-effective procedure for disease surveillance and for the diagnosis of many infectious diseases caused by bacteria, viruses or protozoa, as well as noncommunicable diseases in hospital and outpatient care. Fluorescence microscopy is almost as simple to do as bright-field microscopy, and most often it is more specific. In the past, the high cost of fluorescence microscopes has prevented the wider application of this method. More recently, less expensive fluorescence microscopes have been developed, and accessories are now available that convert a bright-field microscope into a fluorescence microscope. Laboratories should be more aware of the advantages of using fluorescence microscopy. The practical steps of indirect immunofluorescence microscopy in the diagnosis of noncommunicable diseases are also considered