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].