The prevalence of pulmonary and extrapulmonary tuberculosis in forensic autopsies in a teaching hospital in South India

ABSTRACT An autopsy is a valuable tool for finding the cause of death, exploring the clinical diagnosis, documenting unexpected findings, and resolving diagnostic questions. However, this may subject the forensic pathologist and other workers to a wide variety of blood-borne and aerosolized pathogens. Tuberculosis (TB) is the most common cause of illness and death, resulting in infection transmission in the autopsy room. Our objective in this study was to estimate the prevalence of pulmonary and extrapulmonary tuberculosis among forensic autopsies in a tertiary care hospital in South India. We identified positive TB cases from acid-fast bacteria staining and culture (Mycobacterium Growth Indicator Tube and Lowenstein–Jensen medium) out of 380 autopsy cases. The prevalence of tuberculosis was 2.4% (n = 9), among which 2.1% of cases were positive for only pulmonary tuberculosis (n = 8), and 0.3% of cases had both pulmonary and extrapulmonary involvement (n = 1). In the bivariate analysis of TB cases, sex, occupation, family history of TB, habit of smoking, BCG vaccine scar, period of hospital stay, and cause of death were potentially significant. The prevalence of TB in forensic autopsy cases were similar to forensic autopsy-based studies, and it was less as compared to the prevalence of TB in the general population.