Concomitant disseminated tuberculosis and lepromatous leprosy in a previously healthy male.

ABSTRACT

Tuberculosis (TB) and leprosy are two chronic mycobacterial infections caused by intracellular Gram-positive aerobic acid-fast bacilli. Both have highly variable presentations depending on immunological milieu of the host and account for significant disease morbidity. The burden of these age-old infections of humanity still remains high in India. Regardless of the same geographical endemicity of the two, coinfections are sparsely reported. Indeed, studies have revealed an antagonism between them. Of the few coinfections reported in the past, majority were diagnosed over a temporal sequence, with one occurring after the other, and most of these were localized forms of TB associated with leprosy. Only a single case of disseminated TB and lepromatous leprosy has been reported in the medical literature till date. Here, we report another rare case of disseminated TB and lepromatous leprosy that ultimately proved fatal for the patient. The diagnosis of the two diseases was made simultaneously which is again infrequent in the reported literature.