London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

New tests to detect tuberculosis must be developed urgently to win the battle against a disease which is making a deadly return. Tuberculosis (TB), a highly infectious disease which affects the lungs, is spread by coughing so unless progress is made to replace current screening methods, more and more people will be infected.

That’s the message of Dr Ruth McNerney, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, ahead of World Tuberculosis Day. As rates in the UK continue to increase, she will join other TB experts in London – which has been dubbed the “TB capital of Europe” - to discuss whether medics and scientists are winning or losing the fight.

There are more TB cases in the world today than ever before in history - 14 million – and the disease kills more adults every year than any other single pathogen. It is also a major cause of infertility in women. A total of 9,040 cases of tuberculosis were reported in the UK during 2009, with the majority of disease concentrated in urban centres.

London accounts for 38% of cases, with a rate of 44.4 per 100,000 of the population.

The majority of patients are young adults aged 15 to 44 years (60%) and approximately one in 10 cases had one or more social risk factors such as homelessness, drug or alcohol misuse or imprisonment. Experts from a range of universities and other organisations will speak at the meeting organised by the Royal Society of Medicine, in association with TB Alert, the Liverpool Medical Institution and the Manchester Medical Society.

During the day-long meeting, they will consider why rates are rising and what they can do about it. Dr McNerney said:

“It is shocking that this disease is allowed to cause so much misery. We are not good at detecting TB and it is very infectious. The longer people go undiagnosed the more people they spread the disease to.

In some countries less than half of new cases are detected each year. In the UK delayed diagnosis also allows the disease to spread. The tests we use at the moment are just not good enough. They are either inaccurate or clumsy and slow and have to be used in a laboratory. We have fallen behind diseases like HIV and flu that already have simple tests that only take a few minutes.

TB is spread by coughing and without a test to screen for infectious people, how are we going to conquer the disease? We can’t afford to slacken our efforts to control this disease. We want everyone (Government, communities and businesses) to work together to solve this problem.”