CRI听力:Researchers Look for Effective Ways to Cure Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis has taken its toll on not only poor countries, but also poverty-stricken communities in densely populated cities across the world.

Though there are several ways to diagnose the infectious disease, most of them are time consuming or expensive.

One of the disease's biggest setbacks in the past decade has been its growing resistance to antibiotics.

Some patients even have multi-drug resistance, and it sometimes takes 2 years to clear them of the disease.

Doctor Mahdad Noursadeghi, an honorary consultant at University College London Hospital, believes that blood tests are a simpler way to test for the disease.

"The current laboratory diagnosis of TB depends on finding the bacteria in clinical samples from the site of disease and this has the advantage that we can test for antibiotic resistance in the bacteria and tailor the treatment appropriately, but the major problem of that approach is that obtaining samples from the site of disease is really difficult and even when we do get them, finding the bacteria can be very time consuming so there's been a lot of interest in trying to develop a blood test for TB because blood samples are easy to obtain."

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a blood test using a trial of 2000 patients.

However, the test relies on identifying the particular behavior of certain genes, which Norsadeghi believes may not be specific enough, as far as accuracy is concerned.

"I think that it's likely this test will be very sensitive, it will be able to detect an abnormality if it's there, but it may not be very specific, which means that other diseases, or other conditions might give a positive result as well and so, if you like, its negative predictive value is likely to be quite good, but its positive predictive value may not be very good."

Doctors from a mobile TB diagnosis unit in London say there are about 3500 new cases of the disease in the city annually.

The importance of finding a simple, quick and inexpensive diagnosis for TB is as important in Europe as it is in Africa or Asia.

For CRI, I'm Xie Cheng.