Page 123 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid

HIV research were in the forefront. In the midst of the rise of cases of multi-drug-
resistant TB (MDRTB), which the Centre for Antimicrobial Resistance Research
Unit believed ‘threatens to destabilise TB control’ in South Africa, special attention
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was paid by the Centre for TB Research Unit to ensuring that antibiotics used against
TB, like pyrazinamide, did not inadvertently build up resistance against them, and to
discovering whether any particular mutations of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis were
more likely to produce such an effect. This involved innovative genome sequencing,
an approach that was applied in the Centre’s genetic diagnostic testing for TB too,
and in its use of genetic epidemiology to show up the bacillus’s chain of transmission
at a molecular level. The former approach the World Health Organization (WHO)
subsequently included in its revised TB diagnostic policy. The Centre was also to the
fore in identifying biomarkers for tuberculous meningitis, that high killer of those who
had already been HIV+ for some years, and in how to measure responses to treatment
for TB more precisely.
Not surprisingly, given the fact that South Africa was a global TB hotspot,
laboratories in three existing research units supported by the MRC also produced

MRC-NHLS-UCT Molecular Mycobacteriology laboratory, with postgraduate student,
Ms Ntombi Blose, examining Mycobacterium smegmatis cells through a high magnification
Zeiss microscope, 2018.

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