ABSTRACT
Tuberculosis (TB) remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the World. There are multiple challenges which need to be addressed for effective control of TB, the most important being effective and accelerated identification of cases. As such, many tests are available for diagnosis of tuberculosis. However, efficient TB control program is still in search of an easy to perform, economical and rapid test with high accuracy, on all expected samples from a suspected case of tuberculosis. This chapter discusses the various aspects of microbiological diagnosis of tuberculosis including different respiratory specimens from suspected pulmonary tuberculosis cases and different samples from extra-pulmonary tuberculosis cases. Role of acid fast bacilli smear/microscopy, mycobacterial cultures, nucleic acid amplification tests (NAAT) in pulmonary and extra-pulmonary tuberculosis is also discussed. Conventional and rapid molecular drug susceptibility testing is reviewed as is the significance of adenosine deaminase in different fluid samples and histopathology in different tissue samples. Overall, this chapter discusses the clinical implications of the result of available tests on different clinical samples for tuberculosis diagnosis and ongoing advances in diagnostic methodology.
