While persistent cough has been a hallmark symptom of tuberculosis, there should be new ways identified to diagnose the world’s most deadly infection as a new study on Wednesday showed a majority of the patients do not have the common symptom.
The study, published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, analysed data on more than 600,000 individuals in Africa and Asia.
The results showed that 82.8 per cent people with tuberculosis had no persistent cough and 62.5 per cent had no cough at all.
The infection is predominantly transmitted by coughing, but probably also through simply breathing, said researchers from the Amsterdam University Medical Center (UMC) in the Netherlands.