[Diagnostic problems of extrapulmonary tuberculosis in a surgical infected patient sample]

Reported in this paper are 20 cases of extrapulmonary tuberculosis, following septic surgery, between 1983 and 1987. It seems to be as important as ever before to consider tuberculosis for differential diagnosis of abscesses and fistulae. Treatment was rendered to patients with osteoarticular, renal, and lymph node tuberculosis forms. Tuberculosis should be considered as a possibility particularly in the context of periarticular accumulation of pus and therapy-resistant fistulae. The use of pus cultures from tuberculotic abscesses is considered to be a promising approach to bacteriological verification. However, in cases of poly-infected fistulae, bacteriological verification was obtainable solely from animal experiments.