Maxine Caws a, Dang Thi Minh Ha b. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Early Online Publication, 1 September 2010
More than half a century after the discovery of effective drugs, tuberculosis remains an intractable foe. In 2008, 1·8 million people died from the disease, half a million of whom also had HIV.1
Each year an estimated half a million multidrug resistant (MDR) tuberculosis cases develop, of which around only 7% are diagnosed.2 In the 27 high-burden countries for MDR tuberculosis, because of a lack of laboratory capacity only 1% of new patients received testing for drug susceptibility in 2008.2 There is an urgent need for rapid diagnostics for use in high-burden and resource-limited settings.
