Work

Reply to Yates and Barr

Year: 2025

Type: letter

Abstract: To the Editor—We appreciate the interest of Yates and Barr in our study. The infectiousness of people with pulmonary tuberculosis is inherently known to be highly variable [1, 2] and confounds between cohort comparisons of infectiousness; hence our rationale for comparing infectiousness of patients within a given cohort pre- and posttreatment. We acknowledged the limitation of measuring the infectiousness of a given cohort of patients rather than individual patients in these experiments, due to having been unable to hold guinea pigs for a sufficiently long period of time that would have allowed development of disease and subsequent recovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to link guinea pig infections to specific patients. Infectiousness within individual patients is less likely to be variable and we note that the consistent proportion of guinea pig infections pre- and post-treatment initiation in experiment 1 indicates the plausibility of maintained consistent infectiousness of a group of patients not on effective treatment. We also emphasized that these findings provide preliminary rather than conclusive evidence to suggest the differential effects of drugs and regimens on the infectiousness of people with tuberculosis. Repeated studies, contingent on future funding, would be critical to confirm the reproducibility and generalizability of these findings.

Source: The Journal of Infectious Diseases

DOI: 10.1093/infdis/jiaf656

Authors: Ruvandhi R Nathavitharana, Veronica Ueckermann, Elsabe de Kock, Edward Nardell

Institutions: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, University of Pretoria, Brigham and Women's Hospital

Language: English

Topic: Tuberculosis Research and Epidemiology

Subfield: Infectious Diseases

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Institutes of Health