7 August 2025

Every year, an estimated 3 million people with TB go undiagnosed due to limited access to quality diagnostics, weak health systems and reliance on sputum samples. Non-sputum-based tests offer an opportunity to close this gap, particularly for children, people living with HIV and the elderly, for whom sputum collection is often difficult. In this session, Dr. Monde Muyoyeta presented results from the evaluation of tongue swab testing on the MTB Ultima (Molbio, India) and MiniDock MTB (Pluslife, China). These platforms have sensitivity that meets the WHO target product profile, are low cost, battery-powered and portable, offering a cost-effective testing solution for improving access to rapid molecular testing for all people with TB. Please follow the links here to view the recorded ECHO session and related publications.