MOLECULAR EPIDEMIOLOGY OF TUBERCULOSIS IN LATVIA

Molecular Epidemiology in Tuberculosis

The M. tuberculosis pathogen is characterised by a thick, lipid-rich cell wall and membrane. It is a colonal organism, which means that it creates progeny that are very similar to each other. Today, we know that when M. tuberculosis grows and replicates, some of these progenies lose chunks of their DNA, and become slightly different. Genotyping is based on extracting the DNA from M. tuberculosi...

[Molecular epidemiology of tuberculosis].

Despite the almost 50 yrs since the introduction of curative antituberculosis drugs, Mycobacterium tuberculosis continues to exert an enormous toll on world health, and tuberculosis remains the world's leading cause of death due to a single infectious agent. This has stimulated research efforts into finding new tools to tackle the continuing tuberculosis pandemic. One of the few successes to da...

Molecular Epidemiology of Tuberculosis

Molecular epidemiology of tuberculosis.

Molecular epidemiology (ME), a blend of molecular biology and epidemiology, is very useful to study the spread of tubercle bacilli in mini epidemics, outbreaks, to analyse the transmission dynamics of tuberculosis (TB) and to determine the risk factors for TB transmission in a community. ME has a great role in distinguishing between exogenous reinfection and endogenous reactivation. In the labo...

Molecular Epidemiology of Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is a global epidemic, with one third of the world’s population infected, at least 9 million new active cases per year and about 2 million deaths per year. Without adequate chemotherapy treatment TB may be a mortal disease. In countries like Sweden the mortality was dramatically reduced about half a century ago when modern TB drugs where introduced. These gains are however seri...