Drug Susceptibility Testing for MAP, Why Bother?
Traditionally, MAP is a recognized pathogen in ruminants, and is well established as the causative agent of paratuberculosis. Unfortunately, there is no industry standard treatment for paratuberculosis.
Veterinarians and cattle farmers rely on infection control programmes detailed elsewhere (Chapter 21, this volume). However, establishing DST in the context of MAP infections could have purpose in infectious disease medicine.In human medicine, the hypothesized role of MAP as the aetiological agent of Crohn's disease (see Chapter 3, this volume) suggests the potential value of DST in managing human infection and disease (Fredricks and Relman, 1996; Chamberlin et al., 2007a; Kuenstner et al., 2017; Oken et al., 2017; Zarei-Kordshouli et al., 2019). Should new evidence emerge to support a mycobacterial link to Crohn's disease, there will be a need to develop standardized DST methods with the goal of guiding personalized therapies. These DST methods would also help promote a drug discovery pipeline for novel anti-MAP therapies.
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