This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in this journal

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

The article by Wisnivesky et al,¹ and its prediction rule to accurately identify and isolate patients with active tuberculosis (TB), outlines an interesting set of criteria. The authors, however, mistakenly enrolled in their study only patients who were actually isolated; they should have included the patients who had active TB but were not initially isolated. Excluding those patients who should have been isolated resulted in losing a significant number of patients (8/64 [12.5%]) from the typical population we aim at isolating to avoid nosocomial infection. These excluded patients might have had different characteristics from the patients actually included in the study; therefore, the prediction rule Wisnivesky et al¹ propose may have different consequences. In fact, in our institution 8 (33.3%) of 24 patients who were not initially isolated but later were found to have active TB had shortness of breath (unpublished data), which is claimed to be a negative predictor . . . [Full Text of this Article]

RELATED ARTICLE

Evaluation of Clinical Parameters to Predict Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Inpatients
Juan P. Wisnivesky, Jennifer Kaplan, Claudia Henschke, Thomas G. McGinn, and Ronald G. Crystal
Arch Intern Med. 2000;160(16):2471-2476.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT