Time to put an end to TB – World Tuberculosis Day
Tuberculosis is a very complex health care problem that affects over 10 million people worldwide every year. It is treatable and curable, but still dangerous, especially to those with weakened immune systems. Tuberculosis is the second leading infectious killer after COVID-19, and WHO estimates that in 2020 over 1.5 million people lost their lives to the disease, which is a significant increase from the previous year. On March 24th, the World Health Organization commemorates the day when Dr Robert Koch announced that he had discovered the bacterium that causes tuberculosis by raising awareness about the significant social, health and economic consequences of tuberculosis.
What is TB?
Tuberculosis, or TB for short, is an infection caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria. It mainly affects lung function and spreads from person to person through the air. The most common symptoms of a TB infection are a cough, fever, night sweats and weight loss. What makes TB dangerous is that these symptoms can stay mild for months, which leads to delayed diagnoses and care, as well as the transmission of the bacteria to others. A patient with active TB can usually infect 5-15 other people through close contact. TB most often affects adults during their most productive years, but the disease is present in all age groups in all countries.
TB poses a considerably greater risk in countries, where significant parts of the population are HIV-positive. According to WHO, HIV-positive people are 18 times more likely to develop active TB, and nearly all HIV-positive people with TB will die because of the coinfection. What’s more, the currently used sputum-based TB tests have consistently proven to be lacking in diagnosing TB in immunocompromised individuals.
In addition to diagnostic difficulties with immunocompromised individuals, diagnosing TB in children and adolescents is also especially challenging. Children often don’t have the most obvious symptoms of TB, and sputum used for TB diagnosis is difficult to collect from small children.
This is where new rapid point-of-care diagnostic devices would create a significant impact.
Multidrug-resistant TB is quickly growing into a global healthcare crisis
TB is a treatable and curable disease. Usually TB can be treated with a 6-month course of antimicrobial drugs. However, in recent years multidrug-resistant forms of TB (MDR-TB) have become a serious issue worldwide, while the COVID-19 pandemic has at the same time hindered the progress of putting an end to TB.
Multidrug-resistant TB is the result of inappropriate or incorrect use of TB medications and person-to-person transmission. Treating MDR-TB is becoming increasingly difficult, and the treatment is expensive and the recommended medications are not always available.
WHO’s current goals to stop the spread of MDR-TB include rapid detection, proper infection control and appropriate use of medication. New rapid-diagnostics tests are an invaluable asset in helping achieve these goals. And when accurate RTD’s can be combined with a real-time epidemic control platform, containing the spread of the disease and allocating healthcare resources to the most affected areas is much easier.
Let’s end TB
WHO is advocating for more investment of time, money and resources to put an end to the TB epidemic. Quality research and technological breakthroughs could be the key to better disease management. Early detection and large-scale screenings to catch asymptomatic individuals also play an important role in eradicating the disease everywhere in the world.
More needs to be done to manage tuberculosis in low- and middle-income countries that account for a significant share of the world’s reported TB cases. People with TB are among the most marginalized and vulnerable and usually face more barriers in accessing care. Affordable screening and diagnostic tests can help manage the epidemic and aid especially in diagnosing children and immunocompromised individuals.
We hope that our E-TRF method and biosensors, which have so far been successfully implemented for malaria and prostate cancer detection, can also become a low cost choice for saliva based TB screening and diagnostics. During this year, we will start a TB screening test research and development project together with the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research in Ghana, as well as with our research partners at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
Read more about WHO’s campaign to end TB here.
Stay up to date on our projects and company news by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
