US soldiers in high-tuberculosis areas face new epidemic: false positives

U.S. Army service members are increasingly deployed in regions of the world where tuberculosis (TB) is rampant, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military now faces a growing medical problem. But it is not TB itself that is on the rise—instead, the problem lies with the growing number of “pseudoepidemics,” or clusters of false-positives for TB that are the result of universal testing with a notoriously inaccurate tuberculin skin test (TST) and inconsistent procedures for interpreting those tests in low-risk populations.

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