Abstract:
Tuberculosis kills more people than any other infection, mainly in resource-constrained settings where diagnosing tuberculosis and detecting drug resistance are particularly challenging. All tuberculosis tests frequently have false-negative results, causing some patients to miss out on the tuberculosis treatment they need, patients with suspected tuberculosis to require multiple tests before diagnosis, delayed diagnosis, and a significant minority of patients to start treatment of tuberculosis empirically, without bacteriological confirmation of diagnosis or assessment of drug susceptibility. Inevitably, some of the patients receiving empirical tuberculosis therapy do so inappropriately, unnecessarily experiencing stigma, costs, and toxicity, and sometimes causing them to miss out on potentially life-saving therapy for their actual disease process...