New modelling study suggests that testing household contacts and preventive treatment could avert almost 4,000 deaths in children under 15 globally every year.

New Digital TB Surveillance System Report on 19 countries.

19 May 2022 | Geneva: The World Health Organization (WHO) is working closely with Ukraine, countries hosting refugees, affected populations and partners to rapidly respond to the humanitarian crisis caused by war and minimize disruptions to the delivery of critical health care services. As part of these overarching efforts, WHO is working to enable access to tuberculosis (TB) care services for all people with or at risk of TB within Ukraine and in refugee-hosting countries.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that every year 40% of people who fall ill with tuberculosis (TB) globally are not diagnosed. There is thus an urgent need for faster, safe, and more convenient TB tests. The current gold standard of testing still requires people to cough up sputum, something that some people and children, in particular, struggle with. The coughing up of sputum also poses an infection risk to healthcare workers collecting sputum samples.

PITTSBURGH, 17 May 2022 – Unlike other infectious diseases that affect the lungs, the immune response to fight tuberculosis (TB) infections develops at least twice as slowly. Until recently, the dynamic interplay between bacteria and the host’s immune system remained unclear, hampering the development of effective therapies against the disease, which kills more people worldwide than HIV/AIDS and is second only to COVID-19.

A study from Thailand has found that the incidence of tuberculosis was remarkably high among people with HIV during the first year on antiretroviral therapy, and thereafter, decreased significantly until reaching levels comparable to those in the Thai general population after ten years. The study, published in a recent issue of the Journal of the International AIDS Society, is important as it is most probably the first to report such data from a high TB/HIV burden country in Asia.

Almost forgotten today, tuberculosis (TB) is still one of the deadliest infectious diseases in the world. In an interview with Coliquio, Ronald D. Gerste, MD, PhD, an ophthalmologist and historian, looked back on this disease's eventful history, which encompasses outstanding discoveries and catastrophic failures in diagnosis and treatment from the Middle Ages to the present day.

May 16, 2022 – We applaud the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DoHMH) for its leadership as one of the first TB programs in the U.S. and globally to introduce a new four-month regimen for the treatment of drug-susceptible tuberculosis (TB). This new regimen represents a long-awaited breakthrough, offering a shorter alternative to the six-to-nine-month treatment in use since the 1980s. That the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is moving forward to make this regimen available to patients will make treatment more tolerable for people living with TB. As TB survivor and activist Kate O’Brien of We Are TB and co-chair of the TB Roundtable put it, “TB treatment can be such a miserable experience, with all sorts of side effects and logistical complications. Shorter regimens offer patients welcome relief and I’m thrilled to see important government investments delivering better cures for TB.”

On 4 May 2022, Treatment Action Group (TAG) and the Coalition of Women Living with HIV and AIDS (COWLHA) hosted a webinar on how community-led monitoring can be used to generate evidence for advocacy to improve the availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality of TB screening and diagnostic services.

A study published in Diabetes Care suggested that people with latent TB infection are at increased risk of developing diabetes.