Decentralised patient-centred approaches improve tuberculosis diagnosis in India, indicating a vital step in public health.
WHO recommendations on near point-of-care nucleic acid amplification tests (NPOC-NAATs) using tongue swabs and sputum pooling and testing represent a transformative shift in Tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis.1 India has made great progress in expanding molecular diagnostics (NAAT) capacity from 121 sites in 2015 to nearly 6000 sites by 2025. Considering the health-seeking behaviour of the population, where a large proportion of TB patients initially seek care in informal or primary care settings, these strategies could improve diagnosis by ensuring same-day diagnosis and reducing pre-treatment loss to follow-up.
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Shanmugam et al. (2026) studied this question.
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