BACKGROUND The challenge of diagnosing smear-negative pulmonary TB (tuberculosis) in people living with HIV justifies the use of instruments other than the smear test for diagnosing the disease. Considering the clinical-radiological similarities of TB amongst HIV-infected adults and children, the proposal of this study was to assess the accuracy of a scoring system used to diagnose smear-negati...

No tool exists to identify potential under-diagnosis of smear-negative and extrapulmonary TB. In an ecological study, we used a simple tool plotting percentages of smear-positive pulmonary TB amongst newly diagnosed TB in African region countries and provinces in Mozambique against the country’s and provinces’ HIV prevalence. We visually inspected the plots to determine potential under-diagnosi...

Background and Objectives: Sputum smear staining for acid-fast bacilli is initial approach to the diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) but more than 50% of cases are sputum smear-negative. This study was aimed to investigate the diagnostic value of fiberoptic bronchoscopy (FOB) guided bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) in patients suspected to have tuberculosis. Methods: This prospective cross-...

This study was carried out to determine the rate of agreement or disagreement of microscopy reading and culture positivity rate among smear positixe and negative specimens between peripheral tuberculosis diagnostic centres (PDCs) and Central Reference luberculosis laboratory (CTRL). In this study 13 PDCs in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania were involved. Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS) method was ...

Performance of the Xpert MTB/RIF assay, designed to simultaneously detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) and rifampin (RIF) resistance, has been well documented in low-resource settings with high TB-incidence. However, few studies have assessed its accuracy in low TB incidence settings. We evaluated the performance of Xpert MTB/RIF using clinical sputum specimens routinely collected ...

OBJECTIVE To describe the psychological impact on women of being tested for human papillomavirus (HPV) when smear test results are borderline or mildly dyskaryotic. DESIGN Cross sectional questionnaire study. SETTING Two centres participating in an English pilot study of HPV testing in women with borderline or mildly dyskaryotic smear test results. PARTICIPANTS Women receiving borderline ...

Ó Abstract: Background: With the looming global HIV pandemic, the problem of tuberculosis tiptoes as a perpetual companion. Smear negative pulmonary tuberculosis which pose substantially a challenge for diagnosis, hoots this combination into noxious health problem. There is, therefore, an urgent need to establish more sensitive, safe and fairly rapid methodologies that could confirm diagnosis p...

Diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) in technology-limited countries is widely achieved by smear microscopy, which has limited sensitivity and specificity. The frequency and clinical implication of smear-positive but culture-negative among presumptive TB patients remains unclear. A cross-sectional substudy was conducted which aimed to identify the proportion of nontuberculous mycobacteria (...

The rapid and accurate diagnosis of tuberculosis is crucial to providing optimal treatment and reducing the spread of infection. We evaluated respiratory and nonrespiratory clinical specimens using a new automated Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) rRNA detection kit (TRCRapid M.TB; Tosoh Bioscience, Tokyo, Japan), which is based on the transcription-reverse transcription concerted react...