The disease has a high curability.Soft-tissue disease due to NTM infection include post-traumatic abscesses (caused by rapid growers), swimming pool granuloma (caused by M. marinum) and Buruli ulcer (caused by M. ulcerans or M. shinshuense). Post-traumatic abscesses most commonly occur after injection.Disseminated mycobacterial disease was common in US and European AIDS patients in the 1980s and early 1990s, though the incidence has declined in developed nations since the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy. It can also occur in individuals after having renal transplantation. Diagnosis
Diagnosis of opportunistic mycobacteria is made by repeated isolation and identification of the pathogen with compatible clinical and radiological features. Similar to M. tuberculosis, most nontuberculous mycobacteria can be detected microscopically and grow on Löwenstein-Jensen medium. Many reference centres now use a nucleic acid-based method such as sequence differences detection in the gene coding for 16S ribosomal RNA to identify the species.Pulmonary NTM disease diagnosis requires both identification of the mycobacterium in the patients lung(s), as well as a high-resolution CT scan of the lungs. Research
French researchers finalized the genome sequence of M. abscessus in March 2008. The genome is available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=genome&cmd=search&term=abscessus. References
Further reading
Griffith David E.; Aksamit Timothy; Brown-Elliott Barbara;  et al. (2007). "American Thoracic Society Guidelines: Diagnosis, Treatment and Prevention of Nontuberculous Mycobacterial Diseases". American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. 175 (4): 367–417. doi:10.1164/rccm.200604-571st. PMID 17277290. New BTS Guideline has been published in 2017, https://www.brit-thoracic.org.uk/standards-of-care/guidelines/bts-guidelines-for-non-tuberculous-mycobacteria/
Grange, J. M. (2007). "Environmental mycobacteria". In Greenwood, David; Slack, Richard; Peitherer, John; & Barer, Mike (Eds. ), Medical Microbiology (17th ed.
Rapid growers include four well-recognized, pathogenic, rapidly growing, nonchromogenic species: M. chelonae, M. abscessus, M. fortuitum, and M. peregrinum. Other examples cause disease rarely, such as M. smegmatis and M. flavescens.The number of identified and cataloged NTM species has been increasing rapidly, from about 50 in 1997 to over 125 by January 2007. The surge is mainly due to improved isolation and identification techniques.Even with these new techniques, though, the Runyon classification is still sometimes used to organize the mycobacteria into categories. Epidemiology
NTM are widely distributed in the environment, particularly in wet soil, marshland, streams, rivers and estuaries. Different species of NTM prefer different types of environment. Human disease is believed to be acquired from environmental exposures. Unlike tuberculosis and leprosy, animal-to-human or human-to-human transmission of NTM rarely occurs.NTM diseases have been seen in most industrialized countries, where incidence rates vary from 1.0 to 1.8 cases per 100,000 persons. Recent studies, including one done in Ontario, Canada, suggest that incidence is much higher. Pulmonary NTM is estimated by some experts in the field to be at least ten times more common than TB in the U.S., with at least 150,000 cases per year. Most NTM disease cases involve the species known as Mycobacterium avium complex or MAC for short, M. abscessus, M. fortuitum and M. kansasii. M. abscessus is being seen with increasing frequency and is particularly difficult to treat.Mayo Clinic researchers found a three-fold increased incidence of cutaneous NTM infection between 1980 and 2009 in a population-based study of residents of Olmsted County, Minnesota.