In South Africa, the 2001 implementation of the World Health Organization’s anti-tuberculosis program may have inadvertently helped to create a new strain of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR TB).

Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of death due to infectious disease in the world today. It is estimated that 2 billion people are currently infected, and although most people have latent infection, reactivation can occur. This paper by Denise Kirschner and colleagues, publishing in PLoS Computational Biology, conducts virtual clinical trials to examine the causes of reactivation.

The World Health Organization says more than three-quarters of a million people in 19 countries, most in Africa, will receive life-saving anti-tuberculosis drugs over the next year and a half. It says UNITAID, an international funding agency, will donate nearly $27 million to the initiative.

With extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, life-threatening drug-resistant respiratory and skin infections, and other “bad bugs” routinely making headlines, infectious diseases physicians are applauding Rep. Jim Matheson (D-UT) and Rep. Michael Ferguson (R-NJ) for introducing H.R. 3697, the Strategies To Address Antimicrobial Resistance (STAAR) Act.

Donors are meeting in Berlin this week to determine how much money to give to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Fund officials say about 50 delegations from donor countries, the private sector, ngos, civil society and UN organizations are attending the meeting.

An arsenal of promising new medications, vaccines, and diagnostic tests are moving toward the global battlefield that pits medicine against drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB), which is claiming a terrible toll, particularly in HIV-infected individuals, according to an article scheduled for the Sept. 24 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS’ weekly newsmagazine.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced $280 million in grants to fight the global tuberculosis epidemic. The money will be used to develop vaccines, diagnostic tests and drugs to treat a disease that kills nearly two million people each year.

A team of tuberculosis (TB) experts at Johns Hopkins and in Brazil have evidence that substituting the antibiotic moxifloxacin in the regimen of drugs used to treat the highly contagious form of lung disease could dramatically shorten the time needed to cure the illness from six months to four.

The World Health Organization says infectious diseases are spreading around the world at a faster rate than ever before, making them more difficult to treat.

Computer analysis of existing drugs may be key to fighting new infectious agents and antibiotic-resistant pathogens like deadly tuberculosis strains and staph ‘superbugs,’ according to researchers in Canada. The use of such “emergency discovery” technology could save time, money and lives during a sudden outbreak or a bioterrorism attack, the scientists said.

Computer analysis of existing drugs may be key to fighting new infectious agents and antibiotic-resistant pathogens like deadly tuberculosis strains and staph ‘superbugs.’ Researchers in Canada say the use of such “emergency discovery” technology could save time, money and lives during a sudden outbreak or a bioterrorism attack. They reported here today at the 234th national meeting of the American Chemical Society.

University of Alberta researchers stress that all children adopted from outside North America should be screened for tuberculosis. The study shows that in the Canadian province of Alberta, from 2004-2006, 40 per cent of foreign-born children under five years of age who were found to have tuberculosis were international adoptees.