About a third of the world’s population is infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis remains one of the biggest killers among infectious diseases, with up to three million people dying from tuberculosis each year (Dye 1999). Diagnosis of tuberculosis generally relies on smear microscopy and culture of the sputum. The disease typically results in progressively destructive lung lesions but may affect almost any part of the body, usually with advanced wasting and death inmore than half of cases in the absence of intervention. Despite the availability of increasingly effective treatment since the middle of the twentieth century the global burden of tuberculosis has continued to grow. This is partly because it is.
