re: qft-g australia G'day,Tuberculin is the essential ingredient...

re: qft-g australia G'day,

Tuberculin is the essential ingredient of the skin test. We have already heard of various manufacturers in Europe ceasing production of this.

Now, our own CSL has announced that they will cease production of tuberculin in April 2007. CSL are the only producers of Tuberculin in Australia.

http://www.csl.com.au/MR20051111.asp

Of course this means that Australia has two options:

- import tuberculin from overseas (there are many problems with this as each producer/batch of tuberculin is slightly different and it would likely require re-writing of the protocols)

or

- switch totally over to QuantiFERON Gold testing It's pretty obvious that this is the way it will go.

More importantly than this specific situation in Australia (which is a tiny market) is the trend we are seeing of manufacturers ceasing production of Tuberculin in the face of the much more superior QuantiFERON Gold test.