Capacity-building on disease surveillance underway in Accra graphic.com.gh - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from graphic.com.gh Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Detection of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis by Xpert MTB/RIF in Swaziland nejm.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nejm.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Designing effective multidrug-resistant-TB treatments based on DNA sequencing
Globally, tuberculosis is the most common bacterial infectious disease leading to death. The pathogen causing tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, has a number of peculiarities. One is that it is growing very slowly. While other typical pathogens, such as pneumococcal and pseudomonads, can already be identified by their growth in the microbiological laboratory in the first 72 hours, several weeks usually pass before tuberculosis bacteria grow in the lab. Thus it often takes one to two months before the efficacy of individual medicines can be tested.
However, these efficacy tests are essential for the effective treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), which is becoming increasingly common. In these cases, the pathogen has become resistant, i.e. insensitive, to the best tuberculosis drugs, rifampicin and isoniazid. This is due to changes in the genome, so-called mutations, which almost a