Thousands of Chinese people with TB, or their relatives, seeking help dealing with the illness, are turning to a blog by a 21-year-old Beijing-based university graduate, Wei, who describes the challenges of negotiating an overstretched medical system and the fear he felt when he became ill.

The correctional services department owes about R1.3-billion in damages to prisoners and former inmates for bodily injury and rape while in prison.

For the first time, children in Tajikistan with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) are receiving treatment for the life-threatening disease. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has opened a new ward in Machiton hospital, near Tajikistan's capital of Dushanbe, where it plans to treat 60 to 100 children with TB, plus their family members, over the next three months.

An Australian research team has discovered how specialised immune cells recognise products of vitamin B synthesis that are unique to bacteria and yeast, triggering the body to fight infection.

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Diagnostic tests for tuberculosis (TB) were more readily available at secondary- and tertiary-care facilities than in primary-care units in a survey of more than 600 facilities in 9 sub-Saharan African countries.

Drawing on recent findings of a significant rise in cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the UK and globally, top TB researchers at a briefing today in London called for greater focus on the quest for new vaccines—a crucial long-term, cost-effective method for addressing the growing threat.

With growing strong evidence on the dangerous communion between tuberculosis (TB) and diabetes in India, government health programmes must no longer delay implementing TB-diabetes collaborative activities. “Like the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the diabetes epidemic threatens to cause an escalation in TB incidence. China and India constitute 40% of the world’s diabetes population of 400 million people which is likely to go up to half a billion by 2020. If we do not seriously think about the link between TB diabetes my feeling is that it may begin to derail some of the good advances made in India and China on TB control” said Professor (Dr) Anthony D Harries, Senior Advisor, International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union).

"In 2011 India had 6.13 crore people living with diabetes with 983,000 deaths attributable to the disease. India also accounts for 21% of the global incidence of tuberculosis (TB) with 19.8 lakh people developing TB and nearly 300,000 dying of it every year" said Shobha Shukla, Director, CNS Diabetes Media Initiative (DMI) and former senior faculty, Loreto Convent College.

A group of trained rats is on its way to Mozambique to help the country’s over-stretched health system detect tuberculosis in patients, officials said Friday.

Health workers in Myanmar are confident that efforts to narrow the country’s huge gap between access to, and need for, life-saving medicines to treat HIV/AIDS are back on track after the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria invited the country to apply for additional funding.