SETTING Damien Foundation tuberculosis (TB) control project in Bangladesh. OBJECTIVE Early diagnosis of true TB treatment failure and multidrug resistance (MDR) for more efficient DOTS-Plus. DESIGN Prospective comparison of performance on smear-positive sputum of fluorescein diacetate (FDA) vital staining vs. culture, and of slide drug susceptibility testing (slide DST) vs. the Löwenstein-J...

The Tuberculosis Chemotherapy Trials Committee, in the summary of their second report to the Medical Research Council (1953), state that "there is a great need for simple, reliable, and speedy techniques for the culture of tubercle bacilli and for the determination of their sensitivity to chemotherapeutic agents." Since Pryce (1941) introduced the method of culturing M. tuberculosis in smears o...

Haemogram and biochemical tests were normal. Chest radiograph (postero-anterior view) showed shift of the mediastinum to the left with multiple cavities on the same side and contra-lateral compensatory hyperinflation (Figure 1). Sputum smears were negative for acid-fast bacilli on two occasions. High resolution computed tomography (HRCT) (Figure 2) showed mediastinal shift to the left and eleva...

We sought to determine tuberculosis (TB) prevalence including multidrug resistant (MDR)-TB among a cohort of high risk patients at two directly observed treatment short course (DOTS) clinics in Delhi, India. We also aimed to compare the sensitivity of acid-fast bacilli (AFB) smear tests for patients with HIV using sputum cultures as the gold standard. A cross-section study was conducted among a...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of a polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based method (IS6110 insertion site) in the diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis in sputum samples in comparison to smears by using culture on Loewenstein-Jensen medium as a standard. METHODS The study was conducted during the period 1999 through to 2000, at Khartoum Teaching Ho...

BACKGROUND Diagnostic options for pulmonary tuberculosis in resource-poor settings are commonly limited to smear microscopy. We investigated whether bleach concentration by sedimentation and sputum cytology analysis (SCA) increased the positivity rate of smear microscopy for smear-positive tuberculosis. METHODS We did a prospective diagnostic study in a Médecins Sans Frontières-supported hosp...

Lockman and colleagues recently described a study on conventional and molecular epidemiology of tuberculosis in Botswana (4) and found a rate of clustering cases of pulmonary tuberculosis equal to 42%. The authors were surprised by the result, since they expected a higher rate of clustering in a country such as Botswana, where the incidence of tuberculosis is extremely high (over 500 per 100,00...

BACKGROUND Pulmonary tuberculosis and anemia are both prevalent in Tanzania. There is limited and inconsistent literature on the association between anemia and sputum conversion following tuberculosis treatment. METHODS Newly diagnosed sputum smear positive pulmonary tuberculosis patients aged ≥15 years initiating on standard anti tuberculosis therapy were recruited from 14 of 54 tuberculosis...

Objective: In developing countries, sputum smear microscopy is the main tool for pulmonary tuberculosis case finding. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the diagnostic efficacy of Gabbett’s staining (GS) and modified cold staining (MCS), both of which are two-step methods, in comparison with that of fluorescent staining (FS), which is a three-step method, for the detection of AF...