Pulmonary Disease in the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

Excerpt

To the editor; In a letter, Moser and colleagues (1) have presented the case of a specific patient to emphasize the utility of doing both transbronchial biopsy and bronchoalveolar lavage in the diagnosis of pulmonary problems among patients with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), as we recently reported (2). In our report, bronchoalveolar lavage and transbronchial biopsy had a diagnostic sensitivity for Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia of 89% and 93%, respectively; together, both had 100% yield for this pneumonia.

All aspects of opportunistic infections and AIDS are constantly being re-evaluated and revised. Recently, we prospectively performed bronchoalveolar lavage alone in 40