WANGPHA, 20 August 2013 (IRIN) - Struggling to breathe, Burmese migrant Tun Aung Kyaw sits up slowly in bed for a routine check-up at a Thai tuberculosis (TB) clinic along the 1,800km Thai-Burmese border.

An urgent health threat in Myanmar is drawing together leading experts to explore new ways to tackle the drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) crisis. Forms of TB that cannot be treated with standard drugs are presenting at an alarming rate in the country, with an estimated 8,900 people newly infected every year. Yet only a fraction of people with the disease, 800 by the end of 2012, receive treatment. Untreated, the airborne and infectious disease is fatal. Rapid scale-up of DR-TB care is urgently needed country-wide to save lives and stem the unchecked crisis.

A marked increase in the number of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis (TB) cases entirely related to patients born in the Former Soviet Union was observed in France in the last two years. Very few cases were clustered, suggesting it is a consequence of recent immigration of patients already infected in their country of origin. This major increase challenges the existing structures for management of MDR and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB).

Seattle BioMed has received a federal grant to do basic research on why tuberculosis sickens less than 10 percent of the people it infects.

A blog posting from Phumeza Tisile in South Africa who just completed treatment for XDR-TB.

The economic burden of tuberculosis in the European Union far outweighs the cost of investing in more efficient vaccines against TB.

The story today is a far cry from the 1960s, when we led the developing countries’ fight against the disease.

Study shows isoniazid therapy should be considered for millions of HIV-infected people globally.

SAN DIEGO – Tuberculosis patients now have a less-intrusive treatment program that will improve the likelihood that they will take all their critical medications, thanks to an innovative, locally developed treatment-adherence monitoring system that uses mobile-health technology.

‘I had to choose between being deaf and being dead’, this is what Dalene von Delft, a Medical Doctor from Stellenbosch University in South Africa, said in her testimony at a two-day Southern Africa meeting held recently to strengthen and scale up TB /HIV responses in the workplace. The meet was supported under the TB Care II program by University Research Company in collaboration with USAID. In the meeting, Swaziland, Namibia, South Africa were represented by their government, workers and employers’ organizations working in the field of TB.