WHO Buys Time With Tests to Detect Resilient TB

Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis has been sweeping across the world for the greater part of the last five years, alarming international health officials who fear new treatment options for the disease won't be developed in time to prevent a serious epidemic. However, the World Health Organization is employing the use of new diagnosis techniques to buy at-risk countries a little more time.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly half a million people were infected with a bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis, commonly just referred to as tuberculosis, in 2012. However, unlike standard cases of tuberculosis, these infections proved alarmingly resistant to standardized treatment options. This strain of the bacterium, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), has been worrying health officials for years, as timely treatment of these infections is even more paramount than usual due to the bacteria's increasing resilience to antibiotics. If left to divide and spread throughout a victim's body for an extended period of time, eliminating all traces of the bacterial infection often has proven virtually impossible.

Unfortunately, the WHO has recently found that only about one in four of 2012's 50,000 MDR-TB cases were identified in a timely matter. This was mainly due to an alarming lack of access to quality diagnostic services in many countries.

To help fight this, a collaboration of 27 different countries back in 2009 started a world health project called EXPAND-TB (Expanding Access to New Diagnostics for TB).

Following the alarming numbers discovered in 2012, EXPAND-TB helped fund and execute the development of a rapid and accurate test, called the Xpert MTB/RIF assay, that can detect a TB infection that resists standardized antibiotics in less than 2 hours.

According to a recent WHO announcement, this groundbreaking test is currently being introduced in the Republic Moldova, which is one of the world's most at-risk countries for a widespread MDR-TB epidemic.

According to WHO officials, it is the hope of the organization that increased use of Xpert MTB/RIF assay units throughout high-risk countries can keep fatalities to a minimum while world powers and EXPAND-TB work to expedite the development of new and effective antibiotics that current strains of tuberculosis are not resistant to.

The World Health Organization announcement was published on March 20.