Back

Effects of oral hygiene and food intake on tongue swab testing for tuberculosis in South Africa

Luabeya, A.; Olson, A.; van As, D.; Hadley, K.; Wood, R. C.; Mabwe, S.; Petersen, C.; Yan, A. J.; Weigel, K.; Yager, P.; Hatherill, M.; Cangelosi, G.

2026-08-22 infectious diseases
10.64898/2026.08.19.26360845 medRxiv
Show abstract

The WHO has recommended tongue swabs (TS) as alternative samples for microbiological diagnosis of tuberculosis. We evaluated the effects of oral hygiene and food/drink intake on TS performance in South Africa. Food/drink intake prior to sampling marginally decreased Mycobacterium tuberculosis DNA signal strength, but neither behavior decreased diagnostic sensitivity.

Matching journals

The top 9 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.