Join Illumina on World Tuberculosis Day to Raise Awareness and Keep the Fight Up to Eradicate TB
Originally published on LinkedIn
Which infectious disease kills more people in the world than any other? It mutates, mostly impacts your lungs, very contagious in a close household setting, can be asymptomatic and hard to eradicate. Did you want to say COVID?
Actually, its Tuberculosis (TB) and today marks the day 140 years ago that Dr. Robert Koch announced the discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes TB which led to treatments and cures for this insidious disease. But unfortunately, in 2022, TB is on the rise with more than 10 million people infected last year and with increasing multi-drug resistant strains the fear is that it is losing its curable status.
In the last 20 years, more than 66 million lives were saved through more accurate tuberculosis diagnosis, prevention and treatment. A large contributor to this was improved drug resistance surveillance, made possible through genomics sequencing.
At Illumina, our focus is on enabling patient access to our technologies. We know that to reach the United Nations Sustainability Goal of ending TB by 2030 will require routine drug resistance surveillance and comprehensive and timely drug-susceptibility testing.
Join with us on #WorldTBDay to raise awareness and keep the fight up to eradicate this disease once and for all. #Genomics4All
