Early and rapid microscopy-based diagnosis of

OBJECTIVE: Early diagnosis of true TB treatment fail-ure and multidrug resistance (MDR) for more efficient DOTS-Plus. DESIGN: Prospective comparison of performance on smear-positive sputum of fluorescein diacetate (FDA) vital staining vs. culture, and of slide drug susceptibility testing (slide DST) vs. the Löwenstein-Jensen (LJ) pro-portion method. RESULTS: FDA reached 92 % positive and 97 % nega-tive predictive value directly on fresh sputum, but only 94 % and 62%, respectively, on transported smears. Ac-curacy on washed cetylpyridinium chloride transported sputum was similar to that on fresh sputum. Slide DST on fresh smear-positive sputum failed less often than LJ DST, with 96 % accurate results for rifampicin and MDR