Six-thousand year old bones excavated in Jericho may help a joint Israeli-Palestinian-German research group combat tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis may call to mind Old West consumptives and early 20th-century sanatoriums, yet according to the World Health Organization, the disease took the lives of more than 1.5 million people worldwide in 2006.

Almost 1 in 20 cases of tuberculosis worldwide is resistant to multiple drugs (known as multidrug-resistant TB or MDR-TB) and the World Health Organization has called for a massive scale up in public health efforts to tackle these cases.

Scientists have uncovered a new target for the potential treatment of TB, finally resolving a long-running debate about how the bacterial cell wall is built. The research, published in the July issue of Microbiology reveals several molecules that could be developed into drugs to treat tuberculosis.

Outbreaks of tuberculosis (TB) may be able to be identified by looking at certain characteristics of the first two patients, according to new research.

University of Pittsburgh-led researchers discovered that the primary bacteria behind tuberculosis can grow on surfaces and that drug-tolerant strains flourish in these bacterial communities, the research team recently reported in “Molecular Microbiology.”

A new survey cautions physicians that drugs commonly prescribed for patients suffering from immunological disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease may carry risks of serious infections other than the known risk of tuberculosis. The survey published is in the June 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, currently available online.

A new way to treat patients with latent tuberculosis (TB), who are infected with TB but without symptoms, can effectively treat it in less than half the time and at a lower cost than the current standard treatment, according to researchers who conducted a multi-center, randomized controlled trial. The results will be presented at the American Thoracic Society’s 2008 International Conference in Toronto on Tuesday, May 20.

It is pathetically true that Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of TB is still thriving the test of scientific interventions despite affecting almost one -third of the worlds’ population. The fact that it takes approximately one human life every 15 second somewhere in the world is an unfortunate death statistics unmatched by any other microbe.

Amidst an increase in new tuberculosis cases, researchers have begun investigating the effectiveness of new operating room filtration systems designed to protect staff and patients.

New findings show a link between micronutrient supplementation and reduced risk of recurrence during tuberculosis chemotherapy, according to a study published in the June 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online.

Tuberculosis (TB) has long been one of the world’s great killers. Now, forms of drug-resistant TB--multidrug (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR)--are occurring at an ominous and accelerating rate. To help in the fight against drug-resistant TB, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has formulated an MDR and XDR TB research agenda.