Active tuberculosis can be rapidly identified in patients with negative sputum tests by a new method, according to European researchers.

University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) researchers have found that the cost of preventive antibiotic tuberculosis (TB) therapy for patients infected by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is generally less expensive than the reported cost of treating newly confirmed TB cases.

Smoking is a risk factor for active tuberculosis disease, according to a new study on TB incidence in Taiwan.

The typical dose of a medication considered pivotal in Tuberculosis treatment effectively is much too low to account for modern-day physiques, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers said.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is arguably the world's most successful infectious agent because it knows how to avoid elimination by slowing its own growth to a crawl. Now, a report in the July 10 issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, offers new insight into the bugs' talent for meager living.

A team of Harvard scientists has taken an important first step toward the development of new treatments to help people with HIV battle Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) infection. In their report, they describe how HIV interferes with the cellular and molecular mechanisms used by the lungs to fight TB infection. This information is crucial for researchers developing treatments to help people with HIV prevent or recover from TB infection.

Current research suggests that Mycobacterium tuberculosis can evade the immune response. The related report by Rahman et al, "Compartmentalization of immune responses in human tuberculosis: few CD8+ effector T cells but elevated levels of FoxP3+ regulatory T cells in the granulomatous lesions," appears in the June 2009 issue of The American Journal of Pathology.

The World Health Organization released staggering new data about the threat of tuberculosis and the toll it takes on people with HIV/AIDS today, in recognition of World TB Day.

Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and The University of Pittsburgh have developed an onsite method to quickly diagnose tuberculosis (TB) and expose the deadly drug-resistant strains that can mingle undetected with treatable TB strains.

A breakthrough strategy to improve the effectiveness of the only tuberculosis vaccine approved for humans provided superior protection against the deadly disease in a pre-clinical test, report scientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in Nature Medicine's Advance Online Publication March 1. Their findings resulted from more than 6 years of research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Melbourne, Australia —26 February 2009— The newly introduced Interferon-Y release assays (IGRA) is a new group of blood tests that offer many operational advantages over the conventional tuberculin skin tests (TST) -- particularly in the diagnosis of latent tuberculosis (TB).

Older people suffer delayed tuberculosis treatment. A Taiwanese study of 78,118 pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) cases, reported in the open access journal BMC Public Health has found that older people had both diagnosis and treatment delays in tuberculosis and those with an aboriginal background had a longer treatment delay.