Advocates urge the Indian government to stop using kanamycin for the treatment of drug-resistant TB and instead scale up access to all oral regimens.

The Stop TB Partnership launches the Challenge Facility for Civil Society Round 11 with USD 9 million in funding for civil society and communities from high TB burden countries.

Even though annual deaths from Aids are coming down – from a peak of 1.9 million in 2004 to 690,000 in 2020 – that’s still way too many. In 2020, 214,000 people with Aids died of tuberculosis (TB), though only about 50% were confirmed cases while the rest were uncertain. More people probably die of fungal disease than of TB, both in the context of Aids and generally.

Two years of battling COVID-19 has been bad news for tuberculosis (TB) programmes. Respiratory clinicians and researchers have had their time and focus directed elsewhere. And TB has taken advantage. In 2021, the number of TB deaths rose for the first time in over a decade.

Geneva, Switzerland, 7 February 2022 – Two years into the pandemic, health systems are still facing significant challenges in providing essential health services. Ongoing disruptions have been reported in over 90% of countries surveyed in the third round of WHO’s Global pulse survey on continuity of essential health services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scientists from Japan and USA develop a microfluidic device for the purification of tuberculosis genomic DNA fragments from human-plasma sample.

A histone acetylome-wide associations study (HAWAS) performed in immune cells from patients with active Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection versus those from healthy controls, has for the first time provided proof of principle for HAWAS to infer molecular mechanisms of host response to pathogens.

Results of a phase 3 randomized trial found that daily treatment with high-dose rifapentine for tuberculosis (TB) infection decreased efavirenz clearance and achieved therapeutic targets among patients coinfected with HIV receiving efavirenz-based antiretroviral therapy (ART). These findings were published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

In a comment, published in The Lancet Global Health, FIND, the global alliance for diagnostics, described their experinece with two initiatives in India for simultaneous COVID-19 and TB testing, outlining key topics for countries considering the implementation of simultaneous testing.

Among patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), adverse events related to treatment with linezolid and injectable drugs were found to be more common compared with those related to bedaquiline and delamanid, according to a multicenter, prospective observational study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.