South African drug development company iThemba Pharmaceuticals has devised a cheaper way to make the widely used AIDS drug tenofovir and had identified several promising treatments for tuberculosis (TB), Emory University’s Prof Dennis Liotta said yesterday.

Pakistan ranks sixth globally among the 22 high tuberculosis risk countries, contributing 43% of the disease towards the Eastern-Mediterranean region of World Health Organization (WHO).

A TB diagnosis during the first 12 months of antiretroviral therapy (ART) independently doubled the risk that patients at a South African HIV clinic would not gain at least 50 CD4 cells/μL during the first 6 months of therapy, according to results of a retrospective cohort study.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has awarded a grant to the TB Alliance as a member of the Consortium for TB Biomarkers (CTB²) project. The award, distributed over five years, will support the search for tuberculosis (TB) biomarkers, which are biological indicators that can measure the progress of disease or the effects of treatment, and are critical to markedly shortening the time to develop urgently needed new TB regimens.

Rockville, MD, USA | Cape Town, South Africa (March 15, 2012) – Aeras announces today the receipt of a grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of up to US $220 million over five years, placing it at the forefront of a global scientific initiative aimed at developing safe, effective vaccines against tuberculosis, a disease that infects two billion people worldwide. One of the world’s largest not-for-profit biotechs, Aeras is developing modern vaccines to combat TB against the backdrop of a significant increase in drug-resistant strains.

Even though the world's largest study of preventative tuberculosis therapy indicated that community-wide isoniazid preventative TB therapy (IPT) failed to lower community TB levels among 27,000 South African gold miners, that was not Thibela’s only result. We review some of the others over its seven years:

The Stop TB Partnership Working Group on New TB Vaccines presents the Tuberculosis Vaccine Candidates 2011, as an update of the 2009 Pipeline.

Tuberculosis is detected at early stages in Azerbaijan, Director of the Scientific-Research Institute of Lung Diseases, Eljan Mammadbayov said at an event held on the occasion of World Tuberculosis Day, marked on March 24.

Two of every five Vietnamese citizens in recent survey were found infected with latent tuberculosis that could emerge into the disease once the immune system becomes weak, according to Vietnam’s National Tuberculosis Program.

9 March - Johannesburg - Momentum is building towards a declaration on tuberculosis (TB) and mining that would set member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) on a course towards freeing miners, their families and communities from TB.