Not actually SciFi, but something for the laboratory

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TB Testing by the numbers

Dry scientific manuals are so passe'

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A tube, almost filled, slanted, with egg, potato, and salts. A pinch of malachite green, colorful and loved for its wonderful bacterial toxicity; add molecular poisons, inspissate to coagulate, and we’re set.

A few drops of extracted, grotesque, human sputum, maybe harmless, always ugly, brought back to life after it’s spin in a hellish liquid bath.

A human’s saliva, a liquid collection of bacteria, viruses, fungi and gunk; digested, cell walls NALC’d; melted away, then murdered in the alkaline fire of Sodium Hydroxide.

Only the toughest bug, coiled, covered with lipopolysaccharide glue, could pass this barrier and survive until buffered back from the edge of bacterial oblivion.

Mycobacterium, if it can, survives and settles onto the slanted tube of breakfast nutrients, slowly replicating from microscopic clumps to visible colonies.

It is not alone; slimy bacteria and fuzzy fungi can all make it past the digestion process, surely seriously harmed, hopefully not able to out-grow our homeboy.

Days, weeks pass. Held warm as a body, dark and moist in the culture tubes.

Every day the cells grow, not by size, but division, making billions of copies, some identical, some mutated, most deadly.

The few lucky Mycobacteria are allowed to grow on the culture tube; others are stained and microscopically observed, blue and iridescent red.

Insult is added to injury as another drop is completely digested to their unique DNA strings for PCR.

A name can be assigned by color, shape, and growth. PCR helps too, but drug susceptibility testing often require living organisms to beat up and kill.

Weeks pass, sometimes months, and the final determination is made, more time for growth studies against tuberculocidal toxins.

If the host, mostly human, sometimes not, is still alive; treatment, multiple months, shake up the bacterium and loosen its invasive grip. Left unsaid, tiny, protected TB cells hang out, waiting to be re-energized, wearing the body down, slowly, discretely, but deadly.

Public Health TB Control follows through to insist on therapy, fighting against the bacterium and human nature.

Politicians stick their noses in the process. Too much success and the money and treatment protocols dry up, unneeded by short-attention span bosses. TB just keeps a low profile, waiting for politics to change; focus moves to a new bug-of- the-month.

It will be back; it has never left.

Sorry.