Weill Cornell Medicine researchers have identified a protein in Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) that contributes to drug tolerance, a phenomenon that allows bacteria to survive treatment with drugs that would normally kill them.

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic goes well beyond the disease itself. It extends to neglected tropical diseases, as well as the so-called “big three” infectious diseases malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis, by crowding out R&D funds and disrupting non-Covid-19 related healthcare services. 

The century-old Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine against tuberculosis is one of the world’s oldest and most widely used vaccines, used to immunize 100 million newborns every year. Given in countries with endemic TB, it has surprisingly been found to protect newborns and young infants against multiple bacterial and viral infections unrelated to TB. There’s even some evidence that it can reduce severity of COVID-19.

The World Health Organization issues rapid communication on updated guidance for the treatment of drug-resistant TB.

RESIST-TB released its April 2022 newsletter with the latest research publications on drug-resistant TB.

RESIST-TB will host a webinar on 4 May 2022 on the latest childhood treatments and guidelines of the World Health Organization in the pediatric multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) regimens and lessons from the field.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is seeking expressions of interest from individuals or entities with relevant expertise to perform a systematic review of the evidence for the diagnostic accuracy of targeted next-generation sequencing technologies for detection of drug resistance among people diagnosed with TB.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a much less headline-grabbing disease was responsible for the majority of infectious disease deaths: tuberculosis. In 2020 alone, it killed 1.5 million people according to the World Health Organization’s latest “Global Tuberculosis Report.” The same year, COVID-19 claimed the lives of 1.7 million people but received wall-to-wall media coverage — and much more attention and investment than TB.

The global effort against tuberculosis, a disease which takes 1.5 million lives annually, presents some cause for optimism, according to an expert from the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) and a colleague from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

27 April 2022 | Geneva: The World Health Organization (WHO) Global TB Programme is pleased to share its second report of country success stories in mitigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on TB services.