HYDERABAD, INDIA –  The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases will dedicate $30 million in new funding to accelerate development of new vaccines against tuberculosis.

HYDERABAD, INDIA – The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is investing $70 million in a phase III clinical trial assessing the use of tuberculosis treatments in preventing multidrug-resistant tuberculosis infection among high-risk individuals, including infected household contacts of MDR-TB patients and people living with HIV, institute officials announced here.

HYDERABAD, INDIA – Accelerating efforts to prevent tuberculosis wherever it is treated has been the rallying cry in Hyderabad during this conference. One study shows that providing financial incentives plus social support not only improves TB treatment completion but increases TB screening and preventative therapy uptake among household members of TB patients.

WASHINGTON, DC – Malnutrition is a significant risk factor for developing active tuberculosis disease, accounting for one quarter of all 1.6 million tuberculosis cases globally, while other risk factors like smoking and diabetes are attributed with 16% and 7.5% of infections respectively, researchers said here Tuesday.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – When tuberculosis preventive therapy is delivered with HIV treatment services and patients get a choice in where they access treatment, completion of tuberculosis preventive therapy rises, helping to ensure people living with HIV stay healthy, researchers said here. This model of prevention should be scaled up in TB-HIV high burden settings, researchers said.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – New results from the ongoing Nix-TB trial continue to confirm a short-course treatment regimen of bedaquiline – one of the two newest drugs to treat TB in half a century – linezolid and pretomanid offers a significantly improved treatment option for people infected with drug resistant forms of tuberculosis, researchers said here.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands, October 26 – In Mumbai, the largest city in the world’s highest TB burden country, more than half of people living with active tuberculosis disease go undetected and undiagnosed every year. Much of the failure to adequately detect TB cases stems from a dependence on the private sector for health care – more than 70 percent of Mumbai’s TB patients seek care in the private sector. It is a sector that is plagued by suboptimal quality issues, Lal Sadasivan with PATH said here today.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands, October 25, 2018 – Children – especially very young children – are at high risk of developing severe tuberculosis illness when exposed to a member of their household who has active disease, but only 23 percent of child contacts of adults with active disease are provided with TB preventive therapy, researchers said here. That leaves 1.3 million children under the age of five who are eligible for isoniazid preventive therapy without access to the intervention that would prevent illness, according to the World Health Organization. Preliminary results from a study released here show how that can change.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands, October 25, 2018 – Drug susceptible and drug resistant forms of tuberculosis in children can be accurately diagnosed by using existing GeneXpert machines and cartridges to test stool samples for TB bacteria, researchers announced here. Not only can GeneXpert accurately diagnose TB and drug resistance in a fraction of the time it takes to diagnose TB using sputum, Petra de Haas of the KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation said, in a study conducted in Indonesia comparing the two samples more TB cases were detected using stool samples than sputum samples.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands, October 25, 2018 – When the Ebola outbreak hit West Africa in 2014 and took more than 11,000 lives in two years, public and private organizations mobilized the development of a vaccine in a year and a half. That vaccine now is being used to control the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.