Excellent answers. You are correct and well informed in a difficult area of expertise. I was not but now I am.
I wrote this yesterday............Sorry for the false alarm...I am on holidays and on the move, so all I had time was checking the headlines....and let you the experts do the rest....
Hi from Lautrec
It seems I was a bit off the mark yesterday in my remark that the report was bad , ie bad for CST. On further analysis, the report is not related to CST at all.
There are two types of imunity in the blood: 1. Antibody immunity a. The report is about these tests. There seems to be a proliferation of these tests with varying specificity and sensitivity. They are getting antigens from Statens Serum Institut where CST sources its antigens. There was a conflict of interest disclosed in the report. Karin Weldingh is from the Statens Serum Institut and she is mentioned as one of the authors of the report. b. The raison detre for the report was the pressure being exerted by these companies on communities in Sub Saharan Africa. Salespeople backed by inferior studies are exerting enormous pressure and achieving considerable sales. c. The report concludes “None of the commercial tests evaluated perform well enough to replace sputum smear microscopy. Thus, these tests have little or no role in the diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis.” d. The awful pity is that sputum smear is not nearly adequate enough. 2. Cell based immunity a. CST , “Quantiferon is a new revolutionary patented technology platform for measuring Cell Mediated Immune (CMI) response. The other method in the blood that provides immunity is the T cells. And CST measures the response to ESAT 6, CLP10(More recently, selective immunological (interferon-gamma) tests have been developed using the tuberculosis antigens ‘early secretion antigen target 6’ (ESAT-6 ) and ‘culture filtrate protein 10’ (CFP-10), which are not present in BCG, and are found in only a few species of environmental mycobacteria.
The report had nothing to say about CMI
CST Price at posting:
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