Soon, Tuberculosis Screening Could Be Done with a Simple Mouth Swab: Study

New Delhi- Tuberculosis (TB) testing may soon move beyond sputum samples, as a new study shows that a simple tongue swab could be used for screening the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

Researchers from Tulane University, US, reported that an enhanced CRISPR-based technology can make TB testing easier and more accessible, particularly in low-resource communities.

Lead researcher Zhen Huang, Assistant Professor at Tulane’s School of Medicine, said, “Tongue swabs are painless, simple to collect, and don’t require medical training. This opens the way for large-scale, community-level screenings.”

Currently, TB tests rely on sputum — mucus from the lungs — but collecting it is difficult and often impossible in about 25% of symptomatic patients and up to 90% of asymptomatic ones. This gap leaves nearly 4 million TB cases undiagnosed every year.

The study, published in Nature Communications, refined a CRISPR-based method to detect TB bacteria in samples with very low bacterial levels, such as stool, spinal fluid, and tongue swabs. The new tool, called ActCRISPR-TB, enables faster detection of TB DNA, delivering results in under an hour.

Clinical trials showed that tongue swabs detected TB in 74% of cases, compared to 56% with traditional methods. The test also proved highly sensitive for respiratory samples (93%), pediatric stool (83%), and adult spinal fluid (93%).

Since children, HIV patients, and those with extrapulmonary TB often cannot produce sputum, researchers say this innovation could transform early TB diagnosis worldwide.

With inputs from IANS