Tuberculosis has always thrived in the gaps between what medicine knows and what it assumes it knows. Researchers from IIT Guwahati and IIT Madras have now named one such gap precisely: the standard WHO-approved tests for drug-resistant TB examine only 81 base pairs of the rpoB gene, leaving resistance mutations that occur elsewhere invisible to clinicians and, by extension, to the public health systems meant to contain them. In Eswatini, 30 percent of drug-resistant cases carried these undetected mutations — a figure that suggests not an anomaly but a pattern, repeated across Northeast India,
Standard TB Tests Miss Critical Drug-Resistance Mutations, Study Warns
Patients with undetected drug-resistant TB receive ineffective treatment and can transmit resistant strains to family members and communities.