BACKGROUND Chest-x-ray is routinely used in the diagnosis of smear negative tuberculosis (TB). This study assesses the incremental cost per true positive test of a point-of-care digital chest-x-ray, in the diagnosis of pulmonary mycobacterial infections among HIV patients with presumed tuberculosis undetected by smear microscopy. METHODS Consecutive patients with clinical suspicion of pulmona...

BACKGROUND Multi drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) poses formidable challenges to TB control due to its complex diagnostic and treatment challenges and often associated with a high rate of mortality. Accurate and rapid detection of MDR-TB is critical for timely initiation of treatment. Line Probe Assay (LPA) is a qualitative in vitro diagnostic test based on DNA-STRIP technology for the iden...

BACKGROUND The prognosis, specifically the case fatality and duration, of untreated tuberculosis is important as many patients are not correctly diagnosed and therefore receive inadequate or no treatment. Furthermore, duration and case fatality of tuberculosis are key parameters in interpreting epidemiological data. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS To estimate the duration and case fatality...

Our objective was to assess the cost-benefit of enhancing or replacing the conventional sputum smear with the real-time PCR Xpert MTB/RIF method in the inpatient diagnostic schema for tuberculosis (TB).Recent data from published per-case cost studies for TB/multidrug-resistant (MDR)-TB and from comparative analyses of sputum microscopy, mycobacterial culture, Xpert MTB/RIF and drug susceptibili...

BACKGROUND The Indian guidelines on following up sputum smear-negative Pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) patients differ from the current World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines in that the former recommends two follow up sputum examinations (once at the end of intensive phase and the other at the end of treatment) while the latter recommends only one follow up sputum smear microscopy examination...

Background: Clinical presentations of Tuberculosis (TB) vary with in HIV positive and HIV negative individuals. Smear negative tuberculosis is the leading cause of death of HIV patients. Objective: To examine the relationship between bacteriological status of TB cases and TB symptoms in HIV patients. Methods: A cross-sectional analytical study was conducted during January 2004 and August 2005 i...

The aim of this study was to compare direct visual inspection (DVI) with Pap smear in diagnosis of precancerous lesion of cervix. A total of 1500 women were screened cytologically as well as clinically with direct visual inspection of cervix after application of acetic acid (DVI). A total of 1500 women were screened cytologically as well as clinically with direct visual inspection of cervix aft...

Methods The clinical specimens collected from HIV seropositive AFB smear negative patients (Group A) with features of TB, AFB smear positive, HIV reactive (Group B) and AFB smear positive, HIV negative (Group C) were processed as per standard protocol. They were inoculated onto Lowenstein Jensen media and the isolates obtained were subjected to drug susceptibility test (DST) by proportion metho...

Results: Smear and culture results were negative in 24 samples, as was the PCR. The 19 samples testing smear positive, as well as the isolated strains, were 100% positive on PCR, with the exception of the 89.4% result from PCR with MPB64 primers. In the 38 smear negative and culture positive samples, PCR results were inconsistent. The primers specific for amplifying the 123 bp IS6110 fragment g...

Sputum smear-negative HIV-associated active tuberculosis (TB) is challenging to diagnose. CD14 is a pattern recognition receptor that is known to mediate monocyte activation. Prior studies have shown increased levels of soluble CD14 (sCD14) as a potential biomarker for TB, but little is known about its value in detecting smear-negative HIV-associated TB. We optimized a sandwich ELISA for the de...