Tuberculosis (TB) is generally curable. “And it’s the world’s deadliest infectious disease. In 2022, TB killed 1.3 million people, according to the World Health Organization — more than covid-19 or malaria or HIV. Each week, 25,000 people die of TB, a bacterial infection that primarily attacks the lungs.
Of the 10 million people who will become sick with tuberculosis this year, between 3 million and 4 million will go undiagnosed, often dying before they can get an accurate test. Fortunately, GeneXpert tests, made by the company Cepheid (a subsidiary of the conglomerate Danaher), can reliably determine within two hours if a patient has TB. A second cartridge can test for what is called XDR-TB, or extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, a more complex condition that is nonetheless curable if properly diagnosed.
When it comes to selling their tests for tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, such as AIDS, Danaher has touted its profit strategy to shareholders: “We have a razor blade business model in mission-critical applications,” as CEO Rainer Blair put it in January. Razor companies make a slim profit on the handle itself and then charge exorbitantly for replacement blades. That’s also the printer/ink approach. And it’s Danaher’s: Make the GeneXpert machines relatively affordable, hike the price of test cartridges.
Lowering the price of these tests to $5 would save hundreds of thousands of lives over the next decade. That Danaher last year, bowing to criticism, budged on its pricing for the standard TB test was an indication it knows what the right thing to do would be.” From the Washington Post Opinion pages, March 21, 2024
The fact that TB is still a problem and that a small number of people are making money from its continued existence is the sort of international crime that goes unnoticed by most of the world. Too bad the victims and patients of TB can’t file a class-action suit with the World Court. The etiologic agent of TB was discovered 1882. The first TB vaccine (BCG) was tested in 1921. The first effective antimicrobials against Mycobacterium tuberculosis came along in 1944 (streptomycin), 1946 (PAS), and 1952 (INH). Science and medicine aren’t the problem here. As the full WP article notes, it’s money.