Collaborative team from UMass Amherst and Seattle Children’s Research Institute uncovers how prior exposure to bacteria changes the lung’s innate immune response – and what it might mean for vaccines.

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, UNITED STATES, January 17, 2024 -- NanoPin Technologies, Inc. offers a new rapid test to detect both human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and tuberculosis (TB) from the same small draw of blood.

Incarcerated people are at an alarmingly high risk of tuberculosis (TB) and this risk persists for years after their release, according to a study conducted in Paraguay and led by the Universidad Nacional de Asunción and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by “la Caixa Foundation.” The results, published in The Lancet Regional Health, call for urgent and effective TB control measures to protect the health of imprisoned people and their communities.

The Jenner Institute at NDM is conducting a new study using the Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, the only vaccine currently licensed against tuberculosis. People who have received the BCG vaccine previously will be given it again to compare whether giving it by inhalation is better at protecting people against tuberculosis than giving it through the skin.

In 2022, India had notified 24,22,121 TB cases, which the India TB report 2023 remarked as a “milestone year for TB surveillance efforts in India, with a record high notification”.

TB is the leading infectious killer worldwide, with 10.6 million cases and 1.6 million deaths in 2021 alone. One in 5 incident TB cases were attributable to malnutrition, more than double the fraction attributed to HIV. Like HIV, malnutrition is a cause of secondary immunodeficiency and has even been dubbed nutritionally acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (N-AIDS). However, malnutrition remains the neglected cousin of HIV in global TB elimination efforts. Malnutrition increases the risk for TB progression, increases disease severity, and worsens TB treatment outcomes. Thus, it is both a TB determinant and comorbidity.

In spite of gains in public health intervention efforts and medicine, tuberculosis continues to burden low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with higher incidence and mortality rates than wealthier nations.

The health editor of Euractiv, Giedrė Peseckytė, reported back from a press trip to Moldova organised by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to explore the challenges that remain in efforts to end the TB epidemic in the country by 2030, as set in the Sustainable Development Goals.

BALTIMORE, January 9, 2024 — Supporting, Mobilizing, and Accelerating Research for Tuberculosis Elimination (SMART4TB) is excited to announce Boditech Med, Co-Diagnostics, Nuclein and Molbio Diagnostics as partners in developing oral swab-based, point-of-care molecular TB tests.