High rates of genital mycoplasma infection in the highlands of Papua New Guinea determined both by culture and by a commercial detection kit

Abstract

Duplicate vaginal swabs were collected from 100 women, and comparisons were made between an in-house broth-agar culture system and a commercially available kit, the Mycoplasma IST kit (bioMerieux), for the detection of Mycoplasma hominis and Ureaplasma urealyticum. There was good agreement between the two systems for detection of the genital mycoplasmas in terms of sensitivity, with values of >92% being obtained. In terms of specificity, the mutual comparisons were less favorable, though specificity values of >72% were obtained. Statistically there was no significant difference in the performance of the two tests (P > 0.1 for both M. hominis and U. urealyticum). While the broth-agar culture system was considerably less expensive than the kit, the Mycoplasma IST kit provided additional information on antibiotic susceptibilities and had the advantages of a shelf life of up to 12 months and not requiring the preparation of culture media. The prevalences of colonization obtained for M. hominis and U. urealyticum were extremely high in this randomly selected group of women from periurban and rural settlements in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, being ≤70% for M. hominis and ≤78% for U. urealyticum. Colonization with both genital mycoplasmas simultaneously was also very common, with ≤60% of women being colonized by both M. hominis and U. urealyticum.