Molecular epidemiology of tuberculosis in northern Australia
Ella M. Meumann A * and Arnold Bainomugisa BA Global and Tropical Health Division, Menzies School of Health Research and Charles Darwin University, Darwin, NT, Australia.
B Queensland Mycobacteria Reference Laboratory, Pathology Queensland, Brisbane, Qld, Australia.
Dr Ella Meumann is an infectious diseases physician and microbiology trainee. Her PhD is on the application of genomic sequencing to understand the epidemiology of infectious diseases in the Northern Territory Top End. |
Arnold Bainomugisa (PhD) is a scientist and bioinformatician at the Queensland Mycobacterium Reference Laboratory (World Health Organization Collaborating Centre) in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. He is also adjunct research fellow at the University of Queensland. His primary research interests include antimicrobial drug resistance, evolution and epidemiology of microbes. |
Microbiology Australia 43(3) 117-119 https://doi.org/10.1071/MA22037
Submitted: 28 June 2022 Accepted: 3 August 2022 Published: 16 September 2022
© 2022 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of the ASM. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Abstract
Australia has one of the lowest rates of tuberculosis (TB) globally; however, the rates of TB in the Northern Territory (NT) Top End and in Far North Queensland are consistently higher than the national average. Genomic sequencing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) is increasingly being implemented for transmission surveillance and antimicrobial resistance prediction. Genomic epidemiological studies in northern Australia have demonstrated the utility of sequencing for tracking TB transmission. In the NT Top End, this has demonstrated that most TB transmission is occurring in remote regions, with recent transmission and reactivation from latency contributing to incident TB. In Far North Queensland, genomics has been used to track transmission of a multidrug-resistant MTB clone across the Torres Strait. The next steps include implementation of MTB genomic sequencing in jurisdictional laboratories with real-time cross-jurisdictional analysis to inform public health management of TB.
Keywords: epidemiology, genomics, Mycobacterium, northern Australia, public health, sequencing, surveillance, tuberculosis.
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