Can TB reoccur?
Patient: My dad had undergone 6 months medication for tuberculosis 4 years ago and few weeks before he got severe cough and fever. I got worried so I send him to the hospital. He did chest x ray twice . The result says that there are fibrohazed densities in the right upper lobe and hazy densities in the right lower lobe. Impressions: minimal PTB right upper lobe and pneumonia right lower lobe. His doctor prescribed a medicine for 6 month medication same as what he prescribed before but what he said is it seems that the TB occurred again. To get a free medicines we went to a local health unit but when they test his saliva, he said that he was negative on TB? What was result means? Does his disease re occur? Doctor: Yes TB can reoccur.However both the doctor who prescribed tuberculosis treatment without doing a sputum test and the health unit who ended up doing test of saliva are wrong.What your dad needs to do is to give a proper sputum sample and not saliva for the test. If he is bringing out some amount of sputum, then a better test to do will be GENEXPERT/RIF test for tuberculosis.If he is not bringing any sputum then u need a HRCT to confirm the lesions seen on Xray chest are new or old