While TB kills more people each year than HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, more money is allocated to HIV and malaria than to TB in the new Global Fund strategy.

Mumbai: With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic causing a setback for the country’s programme to eliminate tuberculosis (TB), non-government organisations (NGO), TB activists, survivors, and officers will hold a meeting every month to discuss the needs and challenges of its treatment in the country.

The World Health Organization and the Stop TB Partnership’s Global Laboratory Initiative working group release three new manuals to support the implementation of WHO-recommended TB diagnostics.

Lei Zhang, Ph.D., and Michael Niederweis, Ph.D., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham have made what they call “a major step” in understanding how Mycobacterium tuberculosis acquires iron from its human host — a process essential for the pathogenesis of this bacterium. Tuberculosis kills more than 1 million people each year, but without iron, M. tuberculosis cannot grow.

-- Almost half of the world’s population has no or limited access to diagnostics

-- This situation is especially acute in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where diagnostics plays a critical role for treating and containing the spread of infectious diseases such as Tuberculosis (TB) and HIV

-- New partnership between Roche and the Global Fund supports low- and middle-income countries in broadening access to diagnostics, helping millions of previously undiagnosed people with TB and HIV get diagnosed and eventually treated

May 12, 2022 – Over the past few years of his PhD research, Harim Won has been laying the groundwork to develop a new type of antibiotic to treat tuberculosis (TB), addressing the long-standing problems of lengthy treatments and antibiotic resistance. Won is using a new approach to turn a normal protein system in the bacterial cell against itself.

The results of a systematic review and meta-analysis suggest there is an increased risk for tuberculosis among people with cytomegalovirus infection, researchers reported in The Lancet.

Despite being a curable disease, TB can still be a stigmatizing illness, mainly due to people’s ignorance of its causes and transmission, states the NFHS report.

To finally end tuberculosis in Indigenous communities, the federal government needs to take lessons from the Global South and make a major investment.

Worldwide reporting of TB cases declined during the pandemic due to lockdowns, social distancing and COVID’s disruption of the healthcare system. Now, TB experts are bracing for a surge of the disease, which, due to improved diagnostics and treatments, had been targeted for global control within 15 years.