Diagnostic Evaluation of Tuberculosis: Existing Challenges and Merits of Recent Advances

Tuberculosis remains a major global public health problem despite the modest infectious disease control efforts. Timely and accurate diagnosis is pivotal to the reduction in tuberculosis related morbidity and mortality. In addition, drug resistant form of tuberculosis is a serious threat to the efforts at tuberculosis control and eradication. Hence; there is the need for efficient methods of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection diagnosis and treatment. There are major advances in the laboratory diagnostic methods for detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis which seeks to complement or replace the existing conventional methods in a view to reduction in under-diagnosis and improved infectious disease management. Chest computer tomographies, Cephid GeneXpert, Line probe are some of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis diagnostic advances while chest x-ray, sputum microscopy/culture represent some of the conventional methods of evaluation of both Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection and its multi-resistant strain. Intriguingly, the conventional tuberculosis diagnostics though time consuming and inefficient, its use still predominates in high disease burden settings. Meanwhile, the slow transition to use of advanced tuberculosis diagnostic methods seems to have an economic undertone. The seemingly lack of cutting edge advanced Mycobacterium tuberculosis diagnostics in high disease burden countries is attributable to their suboptimal health financing model and over reliance on the donor organizations thereby retarding progress in tuberculosis eradication.