Question: What sort of tests do you do to test whether or not a patient has TB or not???

Emma Roycroft answered on 8 Nov 2016:

Hi Blondey, in the microbiology laboratory, what we aim to do is take a sample from the patient and mimick what it would be like in the body in the laboratory. This way we hope that whatever organism is causing the infection will grow for us. From there, we can identify it and see what antibiotics could be used against it. For TB, we incubate the samples in liquid with lots of nutrients at body temperature to trick the TB into thinking it is still in the lungs. If the TB grows, we can identify it using tests like the ZN stain, or looking at its DNA. The ZN stain shows TB to be tiny pink rods under the microscope, on a green background. TB will have specific DNA patterns that we can recognise and mutations in the DNA might be associated with antibiotic resistance, i.e. the antibiotic will not work for the patient. Hope this explains it! Would you like to work in a laboratory testing for bacteria and viruses?