Electrostatic air sampling for tuberculosis diagnosis and identification of household contacts

Each year tuberculosis (TB) causes illness in approximately 10 million and kills 1.5 million people around the world, making it the single most deadly infectious disease. It has been estimated that one quarter of the world’s population is infected with TB.

Despite political support and endorsement of ambitious targets to reduce incidence and TB-related mortality, most countries are not on target to reach these milestones.

By focusing on aerosolization of M. tuberculosis, this project will evaluate a cheap, robust, safe, point-of-care electrostatic air sampling device to assist in the diagnosis of pulmonary TB and estimate transmission risk to direct contact tracing and latent infection treatment resources.

Building on previous results, we will establish an optimized clinical sampling procedure, then test the device in combination with Xpert MTB/RIF Ultra as a diagnostic tool for the evaluation of patients with symptoms of pulmonary TB, and as a predictor of household transmission amongst patients from Stockholm.

We believe that combining this testing with the routine investigation of index cases will add limited additional workload and would allow more efficient programmatic implementation of household contacts management.

We hope that project results will lead to a paradigm shift in the way transmission risk is evaluated by clinicians through the simultaneous diagnosis of TB disease in patients and assessment of risk of household transmission to their closest contacts.