On April 20, 2026, the scientific news portal PCR.NEWS published an article entitled "A Combination of Classical and Genomic Epidemiological Approaches Identifies a Tuberculosis Transmission Cluster in the Arkhangelsk Region". It described a new article in the journal "Microbiology Spectrum," co-authored by Anna Vyazovaya, Igor Mokrousov, and Dmitry Polev.
A study of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains collected in the Arkhangelsk region revealed an increase in the dominance of the dangerous Beijing genotype—from 39% in 1998 to 67% in 2018. The share of the Russian epidemic variant Beijing B0/W148 also doubled, from 11% to 21%. A traditional epidemiological investigation combined with whole-genome sequencing revealed an enigmatic cluster of closely related strains, reflecting recent transmission through household and family contacts.