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The gold standard for treatment of tuberculosis (TB) is to guide therapy with culture-based phenotypic drug susceptibility test (DST) results. However, such testing is relatively expensive and slow and therefore often not practical in countries with a high TB burden, which use other DSTs with liquid or solid media or molecular testing.
Given the concern that these local assays may not be as accurate as traditional testing and therefore may impact patient outcome, investigators undertook a study involving 634 TB patients in 7 high-burden countries with isolates tested both locally and in a Swiss reference lab. Susceptibility testing in the reference lab determined that 394 patients had pan-susceptible isolates, 45 had monoresistant isolates, …