US, March 25, 2016 – The National Institute of Health (NIH) has revealed that a lot of people worldwide currently live with tuberculosis (TB), without knowing due to resistant strains which cannot be detected using sputum.
The NIH made the revelation in a statement to mark World Tuberculosis Day 2016 on Thursday, March 24, 2016.
It was exactly on this day in 1882 that the German microbiologist, Robert Koch announced he had discovered Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the bacterium that causes TB — an airborne disease that most often attacks the lungs.
“Many countries still diagnose TB by examining sputum samples under a microscope to detect TB bacteria; this approach can take a day to complete and cannot diagnose drug-resistant strains”, the NIH said.
The NIH noted that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health has contributed to the development of the GeneXpert diagnostic test, which can detect TB and MDR-TB in two hours.
“The test is now used in numerous countries, and the NIAID-supported TB Clinical Diagnostic Research Consortium (link is external) — a group of researchers in the United States, South Africa, Uganda, Brazil and South Korea — is working to expand the capability of the test to accurately detect XDR-TB. NIAID is also funding a large-scale project at the Genomic Center for Infectious Diseases at the Broad Institute (link is external) to sequence the genomes of drug-resistant strains of Mtb”, NIH said.
Celebrated with the theme, Unite to End TB, the ailment remains one of the world’s deadliest diseases. However, in 2014 the disease still caused 9.6 million people across the globe to be sick, and killed 1.5 million people, mainly in developing countries, World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.
“TB is also a leading cause of death in people with HIV/AIDS: in 2015, one in three deaths among HIV-infected individuals worldwide was due to TB”, the NIH has said.
