• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.330-337
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• 2013

There are several methods currently being used to diagnose tuberculosis in patients, such as smear, PCR, tuberculosis culture and X-ray. For a proper medical treatment, antimicrobial susceptibility test and rapid drug susceptibility testing have been operated. Tuberculosis bacilli usually need 3~8 weeks of culture period because of delay in RNA synthesis and require 15~22 hours for generation. After a germ raises in culture, we initiated antimicrobial susceptibility test for a proper treatment. It has some difficulties to give a proper prescription for a tuberculosis patient because antimicrobial susceptibility test requires 4 weeks. To supplement this, we are practicing drug susceptibility testing which allow us to know the sensibility of RMP and INH after 2 or 3 days. But this is only possible when more than 2 positive germ. Therefore, we should practice rapid drug susceptibility testing with culture test. But if media is contaminated by other germs except Mycobacterium tuberculosis, it's hard to interpret result about culture test and to practice antimicrobial susceptibility test and rapid drug susceptibility testing. Because we have to practice again smear, culture test after extracting specimen from the patient, time is consumed and proper patient treatment is postponed. To address these problems and quick patient treatment, rapid drug susceptibility testing is practiced by using GenoType$^{(R)}$ MTDRplus method. As a result of this method we detected sensibility 10 and 7 cases and resistance 0 and 3 cases using RIM and INH respectively with other 1 case toward medicals out of the total 11 test. In conclusion rapid drug susceptibility testing can be used from the contaminated specimen after elimination of contaminated source from culture and proved that it can be practiced for rapid examination of a tuberculosis patient.