How smartphones are becoming a weapon in the global fight against tuberculosis
SAN DIEGO — In this vast border region, tuberculosis control is a high-stakes game of chase. Some patients infected with the disease frequently cross into Mexico for work or to visit family, slipping off the radar of public health workers who must verify they are taking their medicines. It is through these cracks in surveillance that the disease sometimes escapes, like a thief through a back-alley exit.
In the past few years, however, a new weapon has emerged that’s proved difficult even for mutating airborne bacteria to shake: the omnipresent smartphone.
Mobile technologies devised by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Johns Hopkins are allowing patients to use their phones to record daily medication intake. The encrypted videos are sent to public health workers who can watch them from their cubicles, instead of traveling long distances every day to visit patients at their homes or workplaces.
It is a simple but elegant solution to a central challenge of controlling TB, one of the and a killer of 1.7 million people globally in 2016. Patients infected with the disease must be carefully monitored for a minimum of six months, and often much longer, to ensure they are
