Word: tb
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...Pillinger and his colleague Geraint Morgan have built upon research they originally did for the Beagle project in order to create a diagnostic tool with the potential to save countless lives. Their device - about the size of a microwave oven - may not look like much, but it detects tuberculosis (TB), the highly infectious, hard-to-diagnose disease that often infects the lungs and kills more than 1.5 million people worldwide each year...
...size of a small car - light enough and sturdy enough to be sent into space. Pillinger always planned to look for terrestrial applications of the mini GCMS once their space research was done, and at Wellcome's request, Morgan began in 2005 to design a version that could detect TB. The device they have come up with requires little maintenance and should be much cheaper than full-sized GCMS models, which can cost millions of dollars...
That's good news for anyone trying to control tuberculosis, which has proven particularly difficult to track in the poorest parts of the world, where medical equipment has to be both affordable and robust. Where clinic staff lack the advanced lab resources to culture TB samples, they test for TB by smear microscopy - a laborious and often ineffective process in which a patient coughs up some sputum and a technician looks at the sample under a microscope, trying to pick out the bacteria by eye. That method "is very good at finding people who are infectious," says Liz Corbett...
...researchers are confident that their device will diagnose the disease more effectively. It works by breaking apart a sample into ions, which it can then precisely identify based on their mass. Morgan and Pillinger's device is designed to search for particles from the distinctive waxy coating on the TB's cell wall...
...researchers still need to fine-tune their technology so it can be mass-produced cheaply. They also need a better method for treating sputum so it's ready for GCMS analysis. In 2009, Corbett will run a preliminary trial for them with 1,200 Zimbabweans suspected of having TB. If that evaluation goes well, the Wellcome Trust has said it will find a company to mass-produce the machine...