TB/Pneumonia?

[aspana]

Hello
My husband has been suffering from high evening fever and sweats with dry cough since one month. Few days back he got admitted in hospital. In his chest x-ray linear opacity is there radiating from right hilum into the right upper zone. CT scan also showed some complications like early cavitation,early fibrobronchectatic changes with multiple small rounded nodules with irregular margin throughout right upper lobe. Doctors started with antibiotics injections with an assumption of pneumonia.TBferon got detected in the meanwhile and they started diagnosing for      
TB. Including bronchoscopy BAL sample all the samples like sputum, blood tested for various AFB, c/s and growth tests but none came positive. They failed to isolate the causative organism(bacteria,fungus or virus). But his leucocyte count  
is high. As his fever came down
&clinically better he got discharged. Some doctors suggest to start emperical treatment for TB. Is there any method available to detect smear negative TB?What might be his actual disease ?Please reply&help us

[texasangel29]

Hi,
just because a sputum smear, or BAL smear are negative it doesnt mean TB is ruled out, the second part of the test, which is the culture takes 6-8 wks to grow something, the AFB, or acid fast bacilli( which is the bacteria that can cause TB ) is slow growing.  starting tb meds empirically is good in the sense that your doctor can always stop the medications if its completely ruled out, rather than waiting 6-8 wks and then finding out it is TB.  

[Paderla Anitha, DNB]

Hello and hope you are doing well.

Besides the investigations mentioned, it needs to be correlated with clinical symptoms and blood tests. Tuberculosis can cause an evening rise of temperature and increased sweating. This also causes a loss of appetite; as such this is accompanied by weight loss. So, record his temperatures, on a two hourly basis to detect an evening rise of temperature. Also, the blood counts will show a raised ESR and increased lymphocytes. So, keep monitoring and you can post any further queries you have, will be glad to answer.

Hope this helped and do keep us posted.

[margypops]

My husband and I have similar ..dry cough for months, some sweats  we do not have TB or pnumonia but we think it is caused by environmental allergies/toxins they have n=been doing a lot of aerial spraying, the toxins from it have been found in ground water and soil check out online 'What on earth are they Spraying"