Rockville, MD, USA (October 10, 2012) – Aeras announces that it has signed an agreement with GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines, S.A. (GSK) to jointly advance the clinical development of an investigational tuberculosis (TB) vaccine containing GSK’s proprietary M72 antigen and AS01_E^* adjuvant.  This novel research and resource-sharing agreement between the largest non-profit TB vaccine biotech and one of the world's leading research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies marks advancement in the race to develop new vaccines against TB, a global infectious disease killer. 

African scientists will conduct genomic research on kidney disease, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, tuberculosis and African sleeping sickness through inaugural grants of the Human Heredity and Health in Africa Consortium (H3Africa). The grants were announced by the two funding organizations, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust, a global charity based in London. The organizations also awarded grants for the development of an African bioinformatics network and two pilot biorepositories, which are banks that maintain biospecimens for future scientific investigation.

Dudley Lee, 59, walked out of Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town, South Africa a free man in 2003. He is now a prisoner of the disease he acquired there.

JOHANNESBURG, 9 October 2012 (PlusNews) - After a troubled past, a revamped South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) was recently unveiled, coinciding with the announcement that the country has achieved universal access to HIV treatment. South Africa must now ramp-up prevention, new SANAC CEO Fareed Abdullah said.

South Africa’s miners are among the workers worst affected by silicosis in the world.

The U.S. Agency for the International Development (USAID) has presented a new five-year project on reinforcement of the control over tuberculosis in Ukraine worth a total of $18 million.

Guest blogger Jonathan Smith from Yale University School of Public Health discusses the challenges of tackling South Africa’s “TB factories.”

In 2011 India had 61.3 million people living with diabetes (17% of the global incidence of 366 million) with 983,000 deaths (20% of the global figure of 4.6 million) attributable to the disease. India also accounts for 21% of the global incidence of tuberculosis (TB) with 1.98 million people developing TB and nearly 300,000 dying of it every year. Diabetes Mellitus is a non curable, non communicable metabolic disease that occurs when either the pancreas fail to produce sufficient insulin, (the hormone that regulates blood sugar), or when the body cannot use the insulin it produces effectively. It can be treated and controlled effectively although, over a period of time, it does increase the risk of heart disease and stroke and can cause kidney failure, blindness and nerve damage.

A group of activists, researchers, policy makers and others working to stop tuberculosis (TB) have created the Zero Declaration, a call for zero TB deaths, zero TB infections and zero TB suffering.

TB CARE I, a programme of the United States Agency for International Development, has published Guidelines to Measure the Prevalence of Active TB Disease Among Health Care Workers.