Only a quarter of drug-resistant tuberculosis cases detected, international study finds

Even as tuberculosis (TB) becomes the most common infectious disease in the world, a new study by an international research team has determined that only around 25 percent of new cases of antibiotic-resistant strains are being detected.

Such a result marks a need for dramatic changes in standardized testing. South Africa has especially suffered from the lack of detection, the research report found. Its findings — published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, with contributions from South African, Swaziland, German and Belgian researchers — revealed some South African bacterium is resistant to the primary first-line antibiotics prescribed, a fact undetected by the World Health Organization’s standard tests.

The result is unsuccessful treatments, leading to greater spread and increased fatalities. Further, antibiotic resistant diseases fed unsuccessful antibiotics only tend to fuel development of antibiotic resistance. In contrast, a new MDR screen test developed by Genoscreen and the research team’s co-director, Center of Infection and Immunity of Lille researcher Philip Supply, analyses a wide selection of target genes in bacteria and identifies resistance to numerous antibiotics in as little as three days. The shortened detection time and the broader range of targeted genes will benefit the detection of resistance mutations in the future if utilized.

Researchers based their findings on a study of 10,000 genomes.

At the end of last month, the United Nations announced a $13 billion annual fundraising plan to eliminate TB by 2030.