Ground Breaking TB work in Tanzania

The Rotary Club of St Andrews members were delighted to welcome as their speaker Dr Wilber Sabiiti, a Senior Research Fellow in the Medical School in St Andrews. Wilber is a member of the Rotary Club of Wakiso in Uganda which is a young club that was chartered last year and is already involved in local health projects.

 He has been working at the University for seven years and his research involves developing rapid diagnostics for respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis and chronic obstruction pulmonary disease. The title of Wilbur’s talk was “Tuberculosis an ever present challenge “. He told us that humans have known about tuberculosis for over a millennia and that the world’s first TB Clinic was established in Edinburgh in1887 by Dr Robert Philip. Even in 2019 TB was reported to have made 10 million people ill and of these one million people had died. TB was declared a global health emergency in 1993. Even today TB is a present challenge in Scotland with around 500 cases in the country.

It is a poverty related disease relating to poor housing and nutrition and alcoholism and smoking.

TB is caused by a Mycobacterium and a quarter of the world population are silently infected with the disease. An unlucky 5% develop active TB and express symptoms. Current diagnosis of the disease can be by having a chest x-ray or a smear microscopy. At the moment these tests are less sensitive and cannot distinguish live from dead bacteria and take a long time to give results. It is a tough disease to treat with a combination of four antibiotics for a minimum of six months. The adherence to treatment is challenging and current tests are less efficient at monitoring treatment.

 Here in St Andrews a new test has been  developed by Wilber and his research team – Tuberculosis Molecular Bacterial Load Assay. (TB-MBLA). This test is able to detect viral TB bacteria in a person and it takes only four hours to obtain a result. These tests were first rolled out in Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania and because the results were so good the test is now available in another 21 countries. The target is to reach all 30 high TB burden countries by 2025.

Rotary member Krishna Krishnaswamy gave the vote of thanks to Wilber thanking him for a most fascinating and thought provoking talk.