Advances in the Diagnosis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Detection of Drug Resistance

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) and is an airborne infectious disease that primarily affects the lungs. More than 125 years after the discovery of the tubercle bacillus, by Dr. Robert Koch in 1882, TB, while both preventable and curable, remains one of the leading infectious causes of death worldwide. TB continues to be a disease associated with crowded living conditions, depressed immunity, and poverty. MTB infects one-third of the world’s population; the World Health Organization (WHO) declared TB to be a global health emergency in 1993. There are approximately nine million new tuberculosis cases and two million deaths reported each year [1, 2]. The directly observed treatment, short-course (DOTS) is the internationally recommended strategy developed by the WHO in the 1990s in order to control MTB by decreasing TB-related morbidity, preventing TB deaths, and decreasing TB transmission. The DOTS achieved cure rates of nearly 80 % and was subsequently expanded as an internationally recommended approach for TB control [3].