Zaheld Islam of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance in the Ukraine shared his organization’s work on TB/HIV integration at a Saturday session of the Union World Conference on Lung Health in France. The Alliance is a Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria sub-grantee in the Ukraine with resources from both TB and HIV grants. They also receive resources from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and UNAIDS.

The results of a large-scale community-randomized trial, which were presented at the 42nd World Conference on Lung Health in Lille, France show that the Zambia South Africa TB and AIDS Reduction (ZAMSTAR) study's "Household Counselling" intervention reduced the prevalence of culture positive tuberculosis by 22% compared to the communities that did not receive the intervention.

With global health funding on the decline, officials are concerned that strains of tuberculosis (TB), including multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), may go untreated. Stop TB Director Mario Raviglione spoke to IRIN/PlusNews at the International Lung Health Conference in Lille, France, about the threat of drug resistant TB treatment and the precarious TB funding gap.

TapImmune Inc. announced that it has signed a Research Collaboration with Aeras. The overall goal of this collaboration will be to evaluate the efficacy of TAP in concert with novel vaccine vectors encoding TB immunogens under development at Aeras with the aim of advancing suitable candidates to clinical development. Aeras will conduct all pre-clinical development studies at their laboratories in Rockville, MD.  

A study in Indonesia has found that people with HIV who injected drugs were 85% more likely to have HIV-associated tuberculosis than those who were not injecting drug users. The findings were presented at the 42nd Union World Lung Health Conference held in Lille, France, last week.

This report outlines the current state of paediatric TB care, looking at current practices, new developments and research needs – in paediatric TB diagnosis, treatment and prevention.

The 42nd Union World Conference on Lung Health, focusing on tuberculosis (TB), HIV, tobacco control and non-communicable diseases, is currently being held at Lille from 26-30 October. Lille is the place where Professors Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin developed the current TB Vaccine BCG 90 years ago at the Institut Pasteur de Lille. Researchers and other experts from more than 100 countries are attending this 5-day conference, which has the theme of "Partnerships for Scaling-Up and Care". The conference is organised each year by the 91 years old organization International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union), which is headquartered in Paris with 13 additional offices worldwide and members from 150 countries.

PUNJAB, 28 October 2011 (IRIN) - Pakistan has intensified efforts to contain tuberculosis (TB), which affects about 17,000 people, making the country sixth among nations with the highest burden of disease, according to officials.

An oral abstract symposium featured a number of presentations on this broad topic at the Union World Conference on Lung Health Friday.  What follows is a snapshot of several of them:

Jan Gheuens, Acting Director of the TB program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) informed a packed audience at the International Conference of Lung Health of key changes in the Foundation’s strategy on tuberculosis.