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Comment
. 2017 Dec 20;15(1):219.
doi: 10.1186/s12916-017-0992-4.

Bringing patient-centered tuberculosis diagnosis into the light of day

J Lucian Davis  1   2
Affiliations
Comment

Bringing patient-centered tuberculosis diagnosis into the light of day

J Lucian Davis. BMC Med. .

Abstract

In 2015, the WHO End TB Strategy laid out ambitious goals to dramatically reduce tuberculosis (TB) deaths, incidence, and catastrophic costs through research, bold new strategies, and patient-centered care. In this commentary, recent evidence on sputum collection strategies for smear microscopy is reviewed, and the argument is made that redesigning smear microscopy as a patient-centered service offers the only realistic and widely available strategy to advance TB diagnostic care towards the initial End TB Strategy goals laid out for 2025. Finally, the successful adoption of same-day sputum smear microscopy as a model for patient-centered TB care is suggested to be synergistic with and to form part of the scale-up of new TB diagnostic tools.Please see related article: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-017-0947-9.

Keywords: Diagnosis; Fluorescence microscopy; Patient-centered care; Prognosis; Tuberculosis.

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Conflict of interest statement

Author’s information

The author is an academic pulmonary and critical care physician and TB researcher with an interest in sputum smear microscopy and other patient-centered approaches to TB diagnosis and case-finding in high-burden, low- and middle-income countries. He contributed to the WHO Expert Advisory Group on New TB Diagnostics review of the evidence on same-day sputum smear microscopy, and has written frequently about same-day diagnosis and other novel approaches to improve the quality of TB diagnostic evaluation.

Competing interests

The author declares that he has no competing interests.

Comment on

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