Detection of M. tuberculosis in the environment as a tool for identifying high-risk locations for tuberculosis transmission

Epidemiology and control strategies for tuberculosis in countries with the largest prison populations

“…Furthermore, Verma et al (2022) conducted a study in two prisons with a high burden of TB in Brazil and found that M. tuberculosis can often be detected in environments recently occupied by individuals with active TB. Through environmental surface swab collection, this methodology can serve as a tool for characterizing the risk of exposure 55 .…”

Phylogeography and transmission ofM. tuberculosisspanning prisons and surrounding communities in Paraguay

“…We identified M. tuberculosis genomic variation from whole genome sequence data with a previously described pipeline available at https://github.com/ksw9/mtb_pipeline 24 . Briefly, we trimmed low-quality bases (Phred-scaled base quality < 20) and removed adapters with Trim Galore (stringency=3) 25 .…”

Genomic approaches to tuberculosis management and control

“…identifying asymptomatic transmission [53] or risk factors associated with infectors. For example, identifying the central role of incarceration in community transmission of TB in certain settings [54,55]. The limitation of transmission trees is that it cannot be applied to every transmission cluster as a minimum number of cases and SNPs are needed among others [56].…”

“…As a consequence a proportion of active cases cannot be analyzed. However, new protocols are in progress to deal with this limitation, by capturing M. tuberculosis DNA from sputum it is possible to sequence the bacterial genome from low bacillary-load samples [54], although the limit of detection of the technique is far from those achieve by qPCR methods like Xpert. The approach can also be applied to detect M. tuberculosis in the environment [54] opening the door to infection risk assessment of indoor spaces.…”