 Hello everyone. I am Dr. Archana. I am the Associate Consultant Infectious Disease Specialist at Manipal Hospital, Oral Airport Road, Bangalore. The diagnosis of tuberculosis in children is difficult. Why? Because children present with nonspecific symptoms and it is difficult to obtain a sample from the children to diagnose tuberculosis because they cannot bring out the sputum. Even if they produce sputum and bring it out, the chances of isolating the organism from the specimen is very mere. This is because the bacterial load in the sputum is very less. With all these constraints, still tuberculosis can be diagnosed with the following strategies. Any child coming with persistent fever of more than two weeks duration, persistent non-remittant cough of more than two weeks duration or weight loss or inadequate weight gain are screened for tuberculosis. So they are screened in two ways. Either it could be bacteriological isolation of the bacilli. So that can be done by obtaining the sample from the child. It can be either the child has to produce the sputum. If the child is not able to produce the sputum, we induce the child to produce the sputum or we collect the specimen from the stomach in the early morning, something called as early morning gastric aspirate and we search for the bacilli in those specimens. The other method is non-bacteriological method where we take the chest x-ray of the child or we do a tuberculin skin testing which is more useful in a child less than two years or might be less than five years of age, but not much useful beyond five years of age.