Biography

Sharon Olifant is a final year PhD student in the Department of Medical Microbiology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her main study field is focused on novel triaging procedures employing self-collected oral swab samples for the detection of tuberculosis and respiratory viral disease in persons at high risk of infection.

Expertise

TB Diagnostics
Public Health

Key Impacts

qPCR batch-processed tongue swabs as screening tool for large-scale community-based case-finding of TB

Tongue swabs collected in PS-MTM, shipped non-refrigerated and batch-processed centrally by affordable qPCR protocols allow for large-scale community-based case-finding that reduces time and cost associated with processing sputum and non-sputum samples individually.

Source: Conference 2024