The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said that a new test to screen for drug-resistant tuberculosis will greatly help the fight against the TB in developing countries.
The test, which involves examining DNA in the saliva of sick people, will provide a diagnosis within two days instead of the usual two to three months."It is a major revolution in TB control," the director of the WHO's TB campaign Mario Raviglione said at a news conference in Geneva.
In developing countries most TB patients are tested for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) only after they fail to respond to standard treatments.
Patients have to wait months for the results before they can receive life-saving treatment. During this period they can spread the disease to those around them. Often they die before the results are known.
Close to half a million people around the world suffer from some form of MDR-TB, which kills around 130,000 people a year.
The WHO estimates that only two percent of drug-resistant cases worldwide are diagnosed and treated appropriately, mainly because of the poor state of health services in many countries.
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Source-AFP
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