INTRODUCTION The importance of family planning can never be over-emphasized in this country. No doubt the relative importance of oral contraceptives as a contraceptive tool has greatly increased, partly dut to the rising number of IUD drop-outs and the increasing awareness. Recently PPFK has begun to consider seriously oral contraceptive as a main contraceptive measure. An enormous number of tuberculosis patients is another big social and public health problem in this country. It has been noted that 4-5% of Korean women of reproductive age have active pulmonary tuberculosis in 1970. The logical question for study is whether we can safely recommend oral contraceptive pills without previous screening for tuberculosis to women of reproductive ages and to women with proved active tuberculosis. Relationships between inflammation and steroid hormones have fairly well been described, even though the mechanism is still in vague. However we have no particular reason to suspect that oral contraceptives(various synthetic sex hormones) are harmful to tuberculosis patients, we are oblized to give a public confirmation of safety. The ultimate goal of this study is to support that wide usage of the oral contraceptive pill is also safe for tuberculosis patients. Therefore, the specific aims of this study are as follows; 1) to study the effects, if any, of oral contraceptive pills on tuberculosis infected experimental animals, with and without chemotherapy, in comparison with well designed control groups. 2) to discover whether the prevalence and the incidence of developing active tuberculosis is higher among oral pill users than control non-users. Supported by research grants from I.P.P.F.