World Health Organization issues the second edition of its tuberculosis diagnosis guidelines

3 November 2026

The World Health Organization has published the second edition of Module 3 of its consolidated guidelines on tuberculosis, the module that deals with diagnosis. The edition brings together in one document the agency's policy guidance on detecting tuberculosis infection, tuberculosis disease and drug resistance, which had been issued separately until now. Three recommendations are new. The first allows a class of near point-of-care diagnostic tests that can confirm tuberculosis at peripheral levels of a health system, rather than only at referral laboratories. The second accepts tongue swabs as a sample type, which matters for patients who cannot produce sputum, including many children and people living with HIV. The third permits sputum pooling, in which samples from several people are tested together, as a way to diagnose tuberculosis and rifampicin resistance more cheaply where resources are very tight. The consolidated guidelines series is the reference that national tuberculosis programmes follow.