Prevalence of tuberculous infection in young children is an important surveillance measure. However, the hypersensitivity may be depressed by malnutrition and thus interfere with the interpretation of tuberculin test leading to underestimation of the infection rate. Objective of this investigation was to study the relationship between tuberculin reaction with 1 TU RT 23 and nutritional status of children. The study was carried out in 1974 among children aged 1-9 years of age living in an urban slum area of Bangalore city and who were not given BCG vaccination.

Of the 1151 registered children aged 0-9 years, 482 in the age group 1-4 and 526 in 5-9 years formed the study group. Of these 1008 children, 980 had both clinical evaluation and anthropometric measurement for nutritional status and 963 had both tuberculin test readings and anthropometric measurements carried out for them. Of the 482 children aged 1-4 years, 230 were classified as suffering from Protein Calorie Malnutrition (PCM) and of the 498 in the 5-9 years of age, 227 were classified as suffering from PCM. Distribution of tuberculin test indurations in mm among the normals and the undernourished were compared; no significant difference in the mean size of tuberculin indurations as well as in the distributions of these indurations was observed, regardless of the method used for arriving at the classification.