How does TB genotyping help TB prevention and control practices?
TB genotyping results, when combined with epidemiologic data, help to distinguish TB patients who are involved in the same chain of recent transmission. In the same way, TB genotyping helps to identify TB patients whose disease is the result of reactivation of a TB infection that was acquired in the past. Since TB prevention and control efforts directed at preventing TB transmission are fundamentally different from efforts to prevent reactivation, genotyping offers a powerful tool to help direct the application of these different efforts. Furthermore, TB genotyping allows us for the first time to monitor our progress toward eliminating TB transmission. TB genotyping identifies genetic links between Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from different TB patients. If two TB patients have isolates with nonmatching genotypes, this indicates (with very rare exceptions, discussed in Chapter 4, Combining Genotyping and Epidemiologic Data to Improve Our Understanding of Tuberculosis Transmissio
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