I am a tb patient. My sputum spear test was 172 positive 2 months ago. Now it is 544 negative. What does this mean. Is my tb better or worse or same as 2 months ago?

Tuberculosis

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Dr. Sajeev KumarGeneral Physician34yrs exp

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Sputum smear microscopy is inexpensive and simple, and people can be trained to do it relatively quickly and easily. In addition the results are available within hours. The sensitivity though is only about 50-60%.9 in countries with a high prevalence of both pulmonary tb and hiv infection, the detection rate can be even lower, as many people with hiv and tb co-infection have very low levels of tb bacteria in their sputum, and are therefore recorded as sputum negative.

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