Raju H. Badiger, Vikrant B. Gatnatti, Chetana Kavatkoppa, Disesha S. V, Shweta Patil, Vivek Patil, Vijayalaxmi R. D, Soumya N. S
BACKGROUND Human brucellosis is an important but neglected disease in India. It is traditionally described as a disease of protean manifestations. The aim of this study was to assess the clinical and laboratory characteristics of brucellosis. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this cross-sectional study, all patients admitted with symptoms and signs suggestive of brucellosis were screened serologically for brucellosis by standard agglutination test. A total of 30 cases diagnosed as brucellosis were investigated in terms of spread of infection, clinical and laboratory characteristics and response to different treatment regimens. RESULTS Our study revealed that fever with drenching sweats remained one of the important symptoms of brucellosis. Other common symptoms were generalized weakness, anorexia, body ache, joint pain and headache. Amongst the signs, hepatomegaly and splenomegaly were more common whereas lymphadenopathy was seen in only few cases. All patients responded to either of the drug regimens, namely rifampicin plus doxycycline or rifampicin plus streptomycin. Over all prognosis was good and none of the patients expired. CONCLUSIONS It is concluded that brucellosis is a disease with protean manifestation with no single diagnostic symptom or sign. Brucellosis should be considered as a differential diagnosis in all cases of pyrexia of unknown origin, low backache, arthralgia, sciatica and in all cases of progressive weight loss.
