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Novel TB Detector Could Shorten Testing Times

from Scientific American

Tuberculosis is a serious public health challenge in the developing world, where the infection claims roughly two million lives each year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Yet the disease, which is a leading killer of patients with HIV/AIDS, is cumbersome to detect, resulting in delayed or inappropriate treatment, greater spread of the infection and preventable deaths.

So, researchers in Colorado are developing a portable, rapid TB sensor that could help reduce the death toll and make treatment more efficient.

This "field friendly" device relies on readily available and relatively low-cost components and can find the lethal pathogen in blood in just 20 minutes, says Diego Krapf, an applied physicist and assistant professor of engineering at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, who designed the new device. That is far faster than conventional methods such as sputum tests, which examine secretions from the lungs and bronchi and can take days--sometimes weeks--to return results.