Context Tuberculosis remains one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases and is closely linked to low socioeconomic and poor sanitary conditions. The increasing emergence of tuberculosis strains resistant to key medicines poses a serious threat to global tuberculosis control. In many countries with a high disease burden, rapid diagnostic methods…
On 25 October 2024, Mbabane, the capital of the Kingdom of Eswatini, hosted the annual meeting of the Sub-Saharan SeqNet Consortium. The event was attended by the country’s Minister of Health, who underscored Eswatini’s leadership in adopting genome-based diagnostics to detect drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB). According to the World Health…
Context Lung diseases are an increasing cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Every year, approximately 10 million new cases of tuberculosis (TB) are recorded, resulting in approx.1.5 million deaths. (Multi-) drug-resistant strains further complicate global TB control and challenge the WHO’s goal to end the TB epidemic by 2030. Moreover,…
Short Description Multidrug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis (TB) represent an increasing threat for global tuberculosis (TB) control. Successful control of M/XDR-TB requires efficient drug susceptibility testing (DST) as basis for designing effective therapy regimens. However, e.g. due to inadequate infrastructure, DST is often missing or delayed in countries…
Eswatini will now be able to detect drug resistant TB and COVID-19 variants after the National Referral Laboratory (NRL) introduced genomic sequencing technology. The Director of Health Services, Dr Vusi Magagula, commissioned the launch of the TB sequencing laboratory in the presence of the German partner Prof Dr Stefan Niemann…
Due to current COVID-19 related travel restrictions, the kickoff workshop of the PharmTrain-CoronaGlobal (PT-CoronaGlobal) project took place as an online event from 27 September to 29 September 2021. In collaboration with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD), the project aims to strengthen the…
In the framework of the GHPP project SeqMDRTB_NET the technology implementation team of Research Center Borstel – Leibniz Lung Center (RCB) visited the National Institute of Health (INS) in Maputo, Mozambique in November 2021. INS has potential to set up the new technology of targeted next generation sequencing (tgNGS), which…