Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tuberculosis laboratory services in Europe

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and associated response have undoubtedly had a dramatic multidimensional impact on healthcare services globally, severely disrupting care for many chronic diseases [1, 2]. Direct impact on communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis (TB), especially in developing countries disproportionally affected by TB, is not yet fully understood but is very likely to put national TB programmes under immense pressure and lead to an increase in TB deaths of 8–20% in the near future [3–5]. This predicted increase is largely caused by delays in diagnosis and treatment of new TB cases due to non-pharmaceutical interventions implemented nationally and globally, in order to contain virus transmission [3, 6–8]. Combined COVID-19 and TB infection also poses a challenge from various perspectives [9]. It is anticipated that the number of co-infected patients increases as the pandemic progresses.

Source: European Respiratory Journal - January 5, 2021 Category: Respiratory Medicine Authors: Nikolayevskyy, V., Holicka, Y., van Soolingen, D., van der Werf, M. J., Ködmön, C., Surkova, E., Hillemann, D., Groenheit, R., ERLTB-Net-2 study participants, Cirillo, D. Tags: Original Articles: Research letters Source Type: research