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?
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 INEXPERT/RIF test for tuberculosis. If he is not bringing any sputum then u need a HRCT to confirm the lesions seen on X-ray chest are new or old