Quantifying Viable M. tuberculosis Safely Obviating the Need for High Containment Facilities.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is an infectious pathogen that requires biosafety level-3 laboratory for handling. The risk of transmission is high to laboratory staff, and to manage the organism safely, it is necessary to construct high containment laboratory facilities at great expense. This limits the application of tuberculosis diagnostics to areas where there is insufficient capital to invest in laboratory infrastructure.

A practical approach to render tuberculosis samples safe for application of tuberculosis molecular bacterial load assay in clinical settings without a biosafety level 3 laboratory.

Background: Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a category B infectious pathogen requiring level-3-containment laboratories for handling. We assessed the efficacy of heat and Guanidine thiocyanate (GTC) to inactivate M. tuberculosis prior to performance of tuberculosis Molecular Bacterial Load Assay (TB-MBLA).

Systematic assessment of clinical and bacteriological markers for tuberculosis reveals discordance and inaccuracy of symptom-based diagnosis for treatment response monitoring.

Background: Clinical symptoms are the benchmark of tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis and monitoring of treatment response but are not clear how they relate to TB bacteriology, particularly the novel tuberculosis-molecular bacterial load assay (TB-MBLA).

Methods: Presumptive cases were bacteriologically confirmed for TB and assessed for symptoms and bacteriological resolution using smear microscopy (SM), culture, and TB-MBLA over 6-month treatment course. Kaplan-Meier and Kappa statistics were used to test the relationship between symptoms and bacteriological positivity.

Molecular Bacterial Load Assay Concurs with Culture on NaOH-Induced Loss of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Viability.

Effective methods to detect viable , the main causative agent of tuberculosis (TB), are urgently needed. To date, cultivation of is the gold standard, which depends on initial sample processing with -acetyl-l-cysteine-sodium hydroxide (NALC-NaOH), chemicals that compromise viability and, consequently, the performance of downstream tests. We applied culture and the novel molecular bacterial load assay (MBLA) to measure the loss of viability following NALC-NaOH treatment of H37Rv pure culture and clinical sputum samples from pulmonary TB patients.