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QIAGEN's QuantiFERON-TB® Gold Plus Gains Endorsement for Latent Tuberculosis Screening in Immigration
[March 14, 2018]

QIAGEN's QuantiFERON-TB® Gold Plus Gains Endorsement for Latent Tuberculosis Screening in Immigration


QIAGEN N.V. (NYSE: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) announced today that its QuantiFERON-TB® Gold Plus (QFT-Plus), the gold standard in accurate, cost-effective testing for latent tuberculosis (TB) infection, has been endorsed for immigration medical screening by the International Panel Physicians Association (IPPA). IPPA is a not-for-profit physician education group that works with countries that receive immigrants and refugees, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. IPPA will hold its 2018 Intergovernmental Physician Training Summit from March 12-16 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

In a statement the IPPA called the modern class of TB tests known as interferon gamma release assays (IGRAs) "essential to the safety and efficacy of screening programs designed for early detection of TB infection." Panel physicians, who are medically trained, licensed and experienced doctors practicing oversas and appointed by receiving country governments to handle the mandatory pre-departure medical examinations of migrants, will now be required to use IGRAs for TB screening. For the United States, more than 760 overseas panel physicians worldwide are responsible for examinations of more than one-half million migrants a year receiving permanent lawful residence in the U.S.



IPPA said it "endorses the use of QFT-Plus, which is an FDA-approved IGRA that has been rigorously studied and validated by independent peer reviewed journals." QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus, the fourth generation of QIAGEN's market-leading IGRA technology, is the only IGRA endorsed by the panel physicians group. The physician group also noted that "IGRAs have notable advantages over the TST, including higher accuracy especially in BCG-vaccinated persons, a single visit to obtain a result, and quantitative electronic laboratory-reported results that are confidential and with little to no subjectivity." Many non-U.S.-born persons have been BCG-vaccinated, particularly individuals from countries with a high prevalence of TB.

The full press release can be viewed here


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