[Is there a reliable new diagnostic procedure in mycobacterial infections including tuberculosis?]

Microscopy remains, for various reasons, even today the most important diagnostic tool for pulmonary TB. Because of the need to monitor drug resistance rates (pulmonary TB) and with other forms of TB or other mycobacterioses radiometric culture techniques, particularly if combined with conventional egg media cultures and with identification of grown bacilli using genetic probes are required on a broad scale; the speed of complete investigation is of utmost importance. Thus, even susceptibility testing should be performed with the radiometric technique. Serology, so far, is unfortunately still incapable of clear-cut answers. This applies also--for the time being--to polymerase chain reaction and other techniques in the field of molecular biology: the sensitivity, specificity and predictive values of such techniques are still not sufficiently high to warrant unequivocal results. This applies also to novel drug resistance tests e.g. luciferase techniques or genetic probes for resistance genes.