The most recent issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating article by Michael Specter on tuberculosis in India, where the most serious problem is not the unavailability or costs of drugs so much as the lack of proper diagnostic tests. This situation may change drastically with the availability of genetic diagnostic machines such as GeneXpert from Cepheid. If it and other machines employing genetic analysis tools were readily available in India, then we could be looking at the end of the tuberculosis plague in India, where each day a thousand people die of the disease.
