4 May 2012 – Geneva - Thirty advocates from a dozen countries gathered in Geneva this week. There were a number of familiar personalities – women and men who have been raising their voices on behalf of TB-affected communities for years. But there were also several fresh faces – community activists devoted to the cause of HIV who were new to TB advocacy.

Ministers of Health and Labour from the 15 Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries have endorsed a declaration on tuberculosis (TB) in the mining sector that is designed to drive a regional response to the issue.

World Health Organization (WHO)-recommended strategies for diagnosing tuberculosis would prevent more deaths than the standard approach now used in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, according to results of a cost-effectiveness analysis of people starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One of the WHO strategies cost less than the current approach.

With a range of diseases, doctors need unique features which they can use to unequivocally identify a patient's illness for an appropriate diagnosis. Scientists therefore search for the biomarkers for an illness or a combination of biomarkers, known as biosignatures, which are as easy as possible to measure. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin have now created complete gene and microRNA expression profiles together with important inflammatory mediators in the blood of tuberculosis and sarcoidosis patients. Although they have identified a signature that distinguishes healthy individuals from patients, the biosignatures of both diseases are nevertheless very similar. It is almost impossible, therefore, to distinguish between tuberculosis and sarcoidosis with just a single signature. A set of different biosignatures is better suited for distinguishing in a first step between diseased and healthy individuals and, in a further step, between the specific diseases.

NEW DELHI: India has finally declared tuberculosis (TB) a notifiable disease. The announcement signifies that with immediate effect, all private doctors, caregivers and clinics treating a patient suffering from TB will have to report every single case of the air-borne disease to the government.

Amid a growing crisis in financing treatments for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in the developing world, an arm of the World Health Organization will meet in Geneva later this month to consider alternative ways of producing lower-cost drugs, vaccines and diagnostic tools to fight the those diseases in poor countries.

When a patient is commenced on ARVs one expects to get better. What happens when one's immune system is compromised is that all infectious diseases find a fertile playground in his/her body.

Meaghan M Kall, Katherine M Coyne, Nigel J Garrett, Aileen E Boyd, Anthony T Ashcroft, Iain Reeves, Jane Anderson and Graham H Bothamley

The National Tuberculosis Institute (NTI) at Bangalore has confirmed that all eight patients whose sputum samples for a re-test have show resistance to all the known TB drugs (first and second line). The confirmation report by institute was sent to the Delhi-based Central TB Division (CTD) on April 19, which was sent to the state health department on Monday.