G'day all,This "news" item was brought to my attention by a...

G'day all,

This "news" item was brought to my attention by a phone call this morning and I am currently trying to find out whatever I can.

The final paragraph of the BBC article which seems to have been accidentally dropped does change the emphasis slightly. It reads:

The new Leicester test will not be employed as a front-line diagnostic tool to detect the presence of the disease, but it is already being used in identifying the strain involved in an outbreak and studying how this is related to those involved in other cases.


Oliveoyl, from my reading, at this stage I would disagree. It seems that they are claiming that they can detect infection ie Latent TB (LTBI), which is what the QFTB test does.

The Leicester outbreak was big news in the UK last year and there are literally dozens of followup articles on the outbreak. The good nbews is that it has woken the UK authorities up to the necessity of dealing with TB.

CST already have a distributor signed up for the UK (Launch Diagnostics) and should therefore benefit from any additional UK attention to this problem. Both the US and the UK authorities have now realised that tb will only be controlled in their countries by not only treating the tb disease (active tb) but also by diagnosing, controlling and treating latent tb.

The Oxford University test mentioned in the article is a test for active tb and therefore has no impact upon CST. This, and a number of other contenders have been around for a while with various levels of success.

Back to the "gene test". From my limited understanding it is a method for detecting TB by recognising it's genes. Sounds good if it works. However, as we long term CST holders know - it is a very long road from the laboratory to the market - and very few bio contenders actually make it. Incidentally, there is also some gene research in this area being done in the US.

The paragraph that I have printed above is quite interesting in that it implies that the gene test is unsuitable for actual diagnosis of individuals - it will be used in an attempt to "group" outbreaks - enabling the various action plans to be commenced - which include testing communities for LTBI - currently using TST but soon using QFTB.

If anyone has further info I am very interested to hear it. Meantime, if I hear anything I will pass it on.