Identification of bovine and human tuberculosis in AFB positive and negative patients

This study was performed on both pulmonary and extra pulmonary tuberculosis. the mycobacterium tuberculosis (mtb) complex was identified by targeting insertion sequence (is6110) and 984 bp fragment was observed while m. bovis was identified by targeting the same insertion sequence and amplified fragment size was 500 bp. the patient's sputum,fine needle aspiration cytology (fnac) of lymph node,pus,peritoneal effusion and pleural effusion samples coming from different rural areas of district gujranwala and hafiz abad were included in the study. these were examined for afb and analyzed for mycobacterial dna (insertion sequence) by pcr. the samples were initially diagnosed for mtb complex and later subjected to m. bovis identification. none of them was positive for human immune deficiency virus. out of 324 samples,pcr of mtb complex was positive in 184/324 (56.79%) tb cases. pcr was positive in 64/324 (19.75%) in afb (acid fast bacillus) negative tb samples,while 120/324 (37.03%) samples were both positive in pcr and afb. out of 324 samples,24 were found positive for m. bovis in pcr among them 16 were negative in afb test. the sensitivity of pcr in tuberculosis(56.79%) was high than that of afb (37.03%). the sensitivity of pcr was high in extrapulmonary tb (70.00%) than in pulmonary tb (52.45%). to conclude,molecular diagnostic techniques are important adjuvant to the traditional microbiological techniques for better and rapid diagnosis of tuberculosis. copyright 2013 zoological society of pakistan.