Materials and Methods

Ethics statement

Committees from the following institutes approved the sampling that is required to achieve this study: Research and Knowledge Unit, Training and Development of Personnel Division in Planning, the Basrah Children’s Specialty Hospital, and the Resource Development Department of the Basra Health Department in Basrah Governorate, Iraq. We gained written agreement from the parents or guardians of the children after a detailed explanation of the goals of our research. We are ethically committed not to breach the privacy of the patient’s family or physically harm the patients, as all sampling was conducted under the care of a physician.
Oral swabs were collected from 25 children with leukaemia (age range 2-16 years old) who were hospitalised in the Basrah Children’s Specialty Hospital, Basrah Province, southern Iraq, during the period from August 2016 to June 2017. The samples were immediately spread on a Sabouraud dextrose agar supplemented with 50 mg/L of chloramphenicol. The petri dishes were incubated at 37ºC for 48 h. Identification of the growth strains was performed through several traditional tests, including the germ-tube test [37], a test of the ability to produce chlamydospores on corn-meal agar (HiMedia, India) with 1% Tween 80 [38] with growth at 30ºC, 37ºC, and 42ºC [15], a test of the colony appearance and colour on CHROMagar (Paris, France), [39] and the detection of carbohydrate assimilation using the API 20c system (bio Merieux Marcy IE toile, France) [15].