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Updated: May 17, 2026

A Tuberculosis Molecular Bacterial Load Assay (TB-MBLA)
Published on: April 30, 2020
Tuberculosis diagnosis after bleach processing for early stage tuberculosis laboratory capacity building
1Instituto Nacional de Saúde Dr. Ricardo Jorge, INSA, IP, Lisbon, Portugal. david.suzana@gmail.com
Abstract:
The diagnosis of tuberculosis is seriously hampered in the absence of standard biosafety laboratory facilities for specimen concentration and Mycobacterium tuberculosis culture. Within a laboratory twinning arrangement, heat-fixed direct smear and sediment from 74 bleach-processed and 20 non-processed specimens from Cumura Hospital, Guinea-Bissau, were sent to Lisbon for molecular evaluation of rifampicin resistance. Sequence analysis of a 369 base-pair rpoB locus detected 3.2% (3/94) resistant specimens. To our knowledge, this represents the first report on the molecular analysis of M. tuberculosis from bleach-processed sputum, an alternative to current diagnostic practice in low-resource settings.
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