BRITISH SCIENTISTS DEVELOP ONE-HOUR TB TEST
Baku, September 15 (AZERTAC). British scientists say they have found a way to diagnose tuberculosis in an hour.
Alasdair Reid is an advisor on HIV and Tuberculosis (TB) at UNAIDS. He says diagnosing TB quickly will revolutionize the fight against the illness.
"It will save time for laboratory staff who have to spend hours each day looking at slides to try and find tuberculosis," said Reid. "It will reduce the risk of death amongst people suffering from tuberculosis because they will be diagnosed and treated very quickly."
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), TB killed over 1 million people in 2008.
Before now, the only reliable way to test for tuberculosis was to take molecules out of a patient and grow a culture from this sample in order to identify if the TB bacteria was present - a process that takes up to eight weeks.
Another method was to identify a particular chemical marker, but scientists found this unreliable because it doesn`t pick up all types of TB.
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