WHO standard: universal access to rapid tuberculosis diagnostics

The World Health Organization (WHO) has just released for the first-time – the WHO standard: Universal access to rapid tuberculosis diagnostics, setting benchmarks to: achieve universal access to WHO-recommended rapid diagnostics (WRDs); increase bacteriologically-confirmed TB and detection of drug resistance; and reduce the time to diagnosis. WHO-recommended rapid diagnostics are highly accurate, cost-effective, reduce the time to treatment initiation, and impact patient-important outcomes.

Although WHO’s End TB Strategy calls for all notified TB patients to be tested initially with a WRD by 2025, in 2021, only 38% received a WRD as an initial test, and access to diagnostics was identified as a critical underlying issue. A significant consequence of the insufficient use of WRDs is the large gap in detecting resistance to anti-TB drugs read more.

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