Vitamin D deficiency is associated with an increased risk of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB), oral thrush and wasting among people starting HIV therapy in Tanzania, investigators report in the online edition of the Journal of Infectious Diseases. People with vitamin D deficiency were almost three times more likely to develop TB than those with adequate levels of the vitamin.

In India, The Union has been implementing pilot projects on bidirectional screening of Tuberculosis (TB) and Diabetes Mellitus (DM). One arm of this has been the screening of TB patients for DM in collaboration with the Central TB Division (CTD), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) and the World Health Organization (WHO). This landmark project, modeled on the Collaborative Framework for Care and Control of TB and diabetes, published by WHO/The Union in August 2011, was key to a new policy introducing screening TB patients for diabetes countrywide.

This follows the UK Government’s announcement in May 2012 that it would be extending this requirement to an additional 67 countries, including Malaysia, based on the figures for high TB incidence provided by the World Health Organisation. 

ABUJA - Nigeria and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria signed five grant agreements today worth a total of US $335 million to support programs that will help significantly expand prevention and treatment of HIV and tuberculosis in Africa's most populous country.

A grim update on biomedical progress on the ‘neglected diseases’, which account for more than 2.6 million deaths per year, confirms how appropriate the name is. Just 3.8% of the 756 new drugs approved in the United States and Europe from 2000 to 2011 treat neglected diseases.

Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Eric Goosby will head the new Office of Global Health Diplomacy at the State Department, while retaining, at least for the immediate future, control over the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, the program he has headed for the last three years. The Global Health Diplomacy office was announced last July as the successor to President Obama’s Global Health Initiative. GHI, a response to neglected and preventable health threats in poor countries, was launched in 2009 and originally planned as a 6-year effort.

In 2013 we enter the second year of the two-year Stop TB in my lifetime World TB Day campaign. The web site for World TB Day 2013 is now live at http://www.stoptb.org/events/world_tb_day/2013/.

The widespread availability of potent combination anti-HIV therapy (commonly called ART or HAART) has greatly reduced deaths from many AIDS-related infections in Canada and other high-income countries. ART does this by suppressing the production of HIV, which in turn allows the immune system to begin to repair itself. The beneficial effects of ART are so profound that researchers increasingly expect that a young HIV-positive adult who starts therapy today should have a near-normal life span, provided that they are engaged with their care and treatment and have minimal pre-existing health conditions.

A federal jury on Monday found that a nurse failed to get proper treatment for a former Ramsey County inmate who grew gravely ill with tuberculosis in the workhouse, infecting other inmates and correctional workers.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a nearly $10 million grant to IDRI, a Seattle-based nonprofit biotechnology organization.