STUDY OBJECTIVE To determine if screening by specialists could reduce unnecessary test ordering and reduce costs related to diagnostic workup in patients undergoing evaluation for tuberculosis. DESIGN Prospective evaluation of expert opinion in consecutive patients suspected of having tuberculosis. SETTING A large municipal hospital. PATIENTS Patients for whom sputum acid-fast smears were...

Tuberculosis is currently the world's leading cause of adult death from a single infectious disease. Sputum examination remains the cornerstone of diagnosis in epidemic situations. To improve the diagnostic process we are developing an automated method for the detection of tubercle bacilli in clinical specimens, principally sputum smears. A preliminary investigation is presented here, which mak...

A 29-year-old man with a history of bulbar ulcer treated 2 years previously and chronic smoking at 13 packs/year was hospitalized for respiratory symptoms made up right basithoracic pain cough clear sputum without fever or progressive night sweats six months in context deterioration general condition. The clinical examination unremarkable.

Sir,?Will any of your readers kindly throw light on the pathogenicity of spirilla in the sputum and oblige? T have recentlv been getting a series of cases suffering from bronchitis, and sputum examination invariably shows the presence of spirilla (along with other organisms), which are thick, short, and have three to five threads each. I have made myself sure that they are not from gums or oral...

Presence of fungal agents in lesions of two patients in Tehran was studied. One of them had clinical symptoms of mycetoma in his foot, and the other had a skin infection in his arm. Examination of the lesions indicated Nocardia asteroides. These patients did not show any evidence of nocardia infection in other parts of the body. Negative results were obtained from the cultures of blood and...

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis (TB) continues to pose a major global health problem and thus intensive action is needed to control and ultimately eliminate the disease. METHODS An active case finding (ACF) survey was conducted in the urban slum areas of the R-South Municipal Ward of Mumbai City for a period of two months from June to July 2012. Micro planning for survey was done by District Tubercul...

Before auscultation wa3 practised physicians attached undue importance to the characters of the sputum in hest diseases, and the)'' fell into the error of supposing that purulent expectoration was diagnostic of phthisis ; when the stethoscope was discovered, they fell into the opposite error and neglected the sputum altogether. Koch's discovery of the bacillary nature of tubercle has revolution...

Sputum cytology is an important diagnostic tool in pulmonary medicine, but it can yield a false-positive diagnosis of malignancy. We describe such a case, which involved a 70-year-old man who presented with chest pain, hemoptysis, and bilateral pulmonary infiltrates. In the initial evaluation of hemoptysis, multiple sputum samples demonstrated cytological abnormalities consistent with adenocarc...