Most resistance-causing mutations in TB have now been identified

UNTIL SARSCVTBHIVAIDSTBTB.CRPTIC,-o-2 emerged, the most destructive pathogen on the planet was , the bug that causes . In 2020, according to the latest report from the World Health Organisation, published on October 14th, this organism cut short 1.5m lives—a figure 100,000 higher than the previous year (and the first annual rise since 2005), mainly because of disruptions to health services caused by covid-19. People whose immune systems have been wrecked by are particularly at risk. Some 200,000 of the 680,000 annual deaths are a result of secondary infections.More than a dozen antibiotics and other drugs are used to treat But strains of that are not susceptible to one or more of these have emerged and are spreading at an alarming rate. Nearly 500,000 of the 10m cases of tuberculosis in 2019, for example, were drug-resistant. Good news, however, emerged on October 19th, when the Comprehensive Resistance Prediction for Tuberculosis International Consortium (y for short), an international collaboration that has been searching for quick ways to diagnose resistant strains, published the fruits of its labours. The result of the consortium’s analysis of more than 15,000 samples from patients in 27 countries is a way of detecting any and every resistance-inducing mutation in a particular bacterium’s genome.