WHO Urges Ban on Blood Test for Tuberculosis
16 August 2011
A petri dish and microscope slide used in the sputum test which takes longer but is more accurate.
This is the VOA Special English Health Report.
The World Health Organization is urging health officials to ban commonly-available blood tests for tuberculosis. W.H.O. officials made the call after two studies found that results from a commonly used test are undependable and misleading.
The blood tests are low-cost and produce fast results. They are widely used in developing countries, especially India. The Indian government says the country has more than two million new cases of TB a year.
A blood test used to detecttuberculosis.
But, researchers say the tests being sold are dangerously inaccurate. They say the results are wrong in fifty percent of patients.
David Dowdy studies infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. He led one of the studies.
DAVID DOWDY: “These tests are actively doing people harm by causing them either to take medicines that they don’t need or delaying the diagnosis that they actually do need, to get better.”
Traditional tests for TB examine the sputum, a material found in a person’s lungs. Active TB is identified if certain bacterium grows in the test material. However, these tests take longer to carry out. Dr. Dowdy says the blood tests are widely used because of the speed of results.
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