الفهرس 
AcknowledgementOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Tuberculosis is an ancient disease that has long been a significant public health challenge in the world with more than 7 million new cases and 3 million deaths each year. These figures may be greatly underestimating the magnitude of the problem because TB is now largely concentrated in the developing world, where the means of detecting, diagnosing and reporting the disease are greatly deficient. Infection caused by M. tuberculosis produce a range of immunologic reactions. Acquired antituberculous immunity is cell mediated immunity and humoral immunity. Antibodies formed against tubercle bacilli are not protective but have a diagnostic value. The antibody response in patients with TB has been extensively studied over the past 80 years. The introduction of ELISA was a major breakthrough in TB detection. ELISA is a simply performed, rapid and reproducible , technique. Several antigens have been evaluated for their serodiagnostic potential in detecting circulating antibodies by ELISA. The sensitivities and specificities of these assays vary considerably as a result of the differences in TB prevelance and in the antigens used in different assays. The highly purified antigens gave the highest specificity reaching 100 . In this study, a commercial ELISA for serodiagnosis of active pulmonary TB was evaluated using recombinant 38 kDa antigen from M.tuberculosis which has been expressed and purified from E. coli. This antigen has been reported as the single most important antigen for the ser<{diagnosis of TB and appears to be completely specific to M.tuberculosis complex ( AI. tuberculosis, M bovis and Mafricanum ).