Diagnosis of active and latent tuberculosis (TB) remains a challenge; however, over the last few years, a new approach based on detecting Mycobacterium tuberculosis-specific T cells has shown much promise. In particular, there is substantial published evidence showing that the detection of ESAT-6- and CFP-10-specific T cells using the ex vivo enzyme-linked immunospot technique is a marked improvement over the existing tuberculin skin test. This technique, which detects gamma interferon-producing T cells, is now available as the commercial assay T SPOT-TB (Oxford Immunotec, Oxford, UK). In the present study, the usefulness of the T SPOT-TB test for diagnosis of TB in "real-world" clinical practice was investigated. Ninety patients of a southern German referral centre for TB with confirmed or suspected TB were randomly selected for this study. The results of the T SPOT-TB test were compared with the results of conventional diagnostic tools. The T SPOT-TB test detected 70 of 72 patients with pulmonary or extrapulmonary TB, indicating a sensitivity of 97.2% (95% confidence interval, 90.3-99.7). For 45 of these patients, tuberculin skin test (TST) results were also available. Only 40 (89%) of these 45 patients were positive in the TST compared to all 45 (100%) in the T SPOT-TB test (p=0.056). Among 12 of 90 patients for whom active TB disease was ruled out, the T SPOT-TB test was negative for 11 (92%), allowing the rapid exclusion of TB in patients suspected to have active TB disease. The T SPOT-TB test is a sensitive assay for detection of TB and represents a useful addition to the diagnostic algorithm available for detecting TB in low-incidence settings.

Bronchopulmonary aspergillosis is becoming more frequent, is often hard to diagnose and with today's antimycotics better to treat than before. It is therefore of current interest. This also concerns bronchial aspergillosis which is less common than pulmonary aspergillosis and the topic of this paper. A total of 39 patients with bronchial aspergillosis are presented: 1) 4 cases with endobronchial aspergilla, two which are visual bronchoscopically, 2) one case with chronic necrotising pulmonary aspergillosis (CNPA), where a bronchus has necrotised, 3) an invasive aspergillosis in the region of a bronchial anastomosis, 4) 7 cases with an Aspergillus invasion from endobronchial tumour tissue and 5) 26 cases with allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA). 37 of the 39 cases are part of a single centre study with a total of 116 bronchopulmonary aspergilloses, which were collected over seven years. The focus of attention in this paper is on the bronchoscopic and radiological results.