Tuberculosis

PCR emerging as a promising technique for Diagnosing Urinary Tuberculosis

Urinary Tuberculosis is often difficult to diagnose and many a times the diagnosis is made by exclusion. Urine polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is emerging as a promising technique for early diagnosis of Urinary Tuberculosis. The technique involves detection of bacteria by facilitating rapid amplification of small amounts of a genome sequence, Dr Narmada P Gupta told the Millennium International...

Time for A.R.Rahman to rock the Tuberculosis Awareness Programme

Music director and composer A.R. Rahman Saturday launched 'TB Sangharsh', the first Indian tuberculosis patients' network, as part of a nationwide effort to create awareness about the disease here. // Inaugurating the network, Rahman, who is a global ambassador for the International Stop TB Partnership, met patients in west Delhi's Mongolpuri area. He also interacted with them about th...

Defending against Tuberculosis

The deadliest bacterial pathogen may soon be fighting a losing battle. Scientists from Rockefeller University in New York say they have successfully stopped the tuberculosis pathogen's ability to operate from the immune system.// It typically hides out in the immune system in a cell called a macrophage. The researchers say they have identified a new pathway (LRG-47) triggered by a host...

Easier Tests To Detect Tuberculosis

Someone in the world is infected with tuberculosis every second and someone dies from the disease every 15 seconds. // Two new studies have discovered easier tests to detect this deadly disease in infants and children in poor countries. Diagnosing tuberculosis is generally done with a gastric lavage. It's an invasive test that involves putting a tube down the throat to collect a sputum s...

Smoking Increases The Risk Of Developing Tuberculosis Infection

In a recent study published in the medical journal Thorax a study concludes that smoking may increase the risk of // tuberculosis infection. The study looked at 2,401 adults from two urban communities in Cape Town, South Africa. The participants were surveyed about their smoking habits and underwent a tuberculin skin test. Factors such as age, sex, education level, body mass index, and income w...

Gene Target For Tuberculosis Identified

For the first time, a gene linked to the disease tuberculosis has been identified which, is held to control the onset of the disease. The gene NRAMP1 is known to be involved in a number of other diseases like leprosy // and rheumatoid arthritis. Different forms of the gene are held to control the speed at which tuberculosis develops. Certain factors are already known to increase the spee...

WHO declares Tuberculosis – ‘An Emergency’ in Afrca

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared Tuberculosis as an emergency in Africa. It is killing more than half a million people every year. WHO Regional // Committee for Africa comprising health ministers from 46 Member States has declared tuberculosis an emergency in the African region. The deaths have quadrupled in the last few years. A resolution was adopted today at the end...

New Vaccine Targeted At Effective Treatment Against Tuberculosis

Globally, tuberculosis remains the number one killer in adults. TB is a lung disease, caused by a bacterium. Health experts say a new person is infected with TB somewhere in the world every second. // A vaccine against tuberculosis, termed BCG is currently available which, however, fails to protect against the most frequent form of disease, pulmonary tuberculosis in adults. Moreover, m...

BCG vaccine to be boosted to effectively prevent tuberculosis

Tuberculosis remains a major global health threat. One method of reducing the incidence of the disease is to vaccinate the person with the so called BCG vaccine. //Although more than 3 billion doses of the BCG vaccine have been administered to fight tuberculosis, the ability of the BCG vaccine to protect adults is very limited. This has led us to ponder over the effectiveness of the vaccine i...

BCG vaccine for both Protection and treatment of Tuberculosis

Dr. Ajit Lalvani and colleagues from University of Oxford, UK has found a new theory from the results of their experiment in which BCG vaccination which is administered world wide for children’s to prevent// from Tuberculosis infection is also found to be an effective treatment in patients with TB infection. The researchers studied the risk factors involved for TB infection in 979 children, of wh...

Historic trial for tuberculosis launched together by leading drug companies

Two leading pharmaceutical companies, The Global Alliance for TB Drug Development (TB Alliance) and Bayer Healthcare have announced a partnership to coordinate the study to uncover the potential of an existing antibiotic, //Moxifloxacin, to shorten the standard 6-month treatment of tuberculosis (TB). Mycobacterium tuberculosis infects one-third of the world's population, resulting in ni...

Diagnostic Procedure For Tuberculosis Made Easy

Gone are the days where a patient has to wait for weeks to get the test results of tuberculosis, as it now takes just a few days for the disease that claim about 5,000 lives a day in the world//. A new diagnostic test can identify its bacteria in a few days' time. The Imperial College of London has developed a new diagnosis that identifies its bacteria in days and experts...

PA-824 drug effective against Tuberculosis

Researchers from NIH lab, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have found the mechanism of action of the new drug PA-824 which is found to be highly effective in controlling tuberculosis, which is// caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Researchers have found that the drug PA-824 is very effective in very short doses of anti-tuberculosis regimen and is found to kill...

Tuberculosis test for Westminster High School

Middlesex London Health officials will be testing the Westminster High School students and staff for the presence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis which is responsible for causing Tuberculosis. // The tests are precautionary measures after a student of the school was tested positive for the active form of the bacterium and the officials are testing the presence of these bacteria in other students an...

New Drug Combination For Fighting Tuberculosis

The Government of Zimbabwe has applied for a financial grant amounting to approximately 110// million U.S. dollars, to develop a new drug for combating tuberculosis, said the Cabinet Minister. // The application has been forwarded to the Global Fund on AIDS, TB and Malaria, according to the Health and Child Welfare Minister. It is anticipated that approximately 15 and 30 million doll...

Vitamin D May Help In Fight Against Tuberculosis

A new research has offered insights into why Africans have an increased susceptibility to tuberculosis and have severe manifestation of the disease compared to whites. // Worldwide, approximately more than 8 million people are afflicted with TB and over 2 million people die due to the same every year. The disease is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. According to official sources, the inciden...

DOTS For Tuberculosis TO Cover Entire Country

The Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (DOTS) tuberculosis control programme will cover the entire country by November 2006 said union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said here Sunday.// "The drugs for the DOTS programme will be made available even in petty shops and dhabas in remote areas," said the minister at a function here to open a new HIV vaccine trial and patient care f...

WHO Devises New Global Strategy To Fight Tuberculosis

A new global strategy devised by the World Health Organization (WHO) would be adopted to effectively manage tuberculosis, an infectious disease that claims the lives of nearly 1.7 million people, worldwide //. The $56 billion global plan would be launched in January and targets reduction of prevalence of TB and the associated death rate by as much as 50% by the end of 2015. If this we...

Protective Protein Could Hold The Key In Fight Against Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis remains one of the public health challenges of the 21st century in developing countries. Although most Americans feel that TB is a disease of the past, TB claims a valuable human life, every six seconds//, worldwide. Nearly one-third of the population is infected with mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative organism. India deserves the credit of housing the maximum number of TB pa...

Africa Suffers Tuberculosis as a Fallout of HIV/AIDS and Poverty

Nairobi - The WHO has revealed that Africa's TB crisis has its origin in HIV/AIDS, weak health systems and poverty. Statistics show that//, of the two million people who die from TB every year, 1.5 million are Africans. Winfred Nzioka, a nurse at the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) clinic in the Kenyan slum, revealed that most of the patients who succumbed to TB were a...

Tuberculosis Is Still A Major Health Threat In Africa

With 24th March celebrated as the world tuberculosis day. It was thought decades ago that the problem was the verge of being irradiated, but sadly it still remains a major // threat and its toll still rising. The WHO warned that the cases were still rising at almost 1% every year despite the efforts taken against it globally. Tuberculosis has killed about 1.7 million people globally in...

Tuberculosis Outbreak In Manitoba Reserve

Health officials in Manitoba are facing public ire for not acting quickly to curb the tuberculosis outbreak that has occurred in northern Manitoba First Nations communities.// It is reported that at least 19 people have been diagnosed with the condition in and around the Garden Hill reserve. Jack Harper, a resident of Garden Hill told CBC News that he became aware that his wife had the...

Detecting Latent Tuberculosis Effective With Blood Tests

Italian researchers claim the superiority of blood tests over skin tests for detecting people with latent tuberculosis. //According to them blood tests are effective, reliable and therefore holds promise in detecting latent TB. Though the numerous people with the dormant TB infection never actually get a full blown respiratory disease, yet it becomes imperative to detect such cases and...

Tuberculosis Screening To Be Spruced Up At Ports of Entry

The Health Protection Agency has raised doubts about the TB X-Ray screening arangements at the points of entry- Airport and Ports. // How effective is the screening for Tuberculosis infections at the Airport for people entering England, especially from countries that are reeling under the TB onslaught ? According to offcial reports by the HPA, only about 27% of the total number of peo...

Tuberculosis Claims Three Victims

Tuberculosis claimed the lives of three residents at a Eastercroft nursing home in Caldercruix, While two of the victims died in ‘early May’ the third succumbed to the disease in ‘early June’. A fourth resident...

Tuberculosis Alarm At Brisbane Childcare Center

At Brisbane childcare center, a tuberculosis case alerts the health authorities //. Tuberculosis has been diagnosed in a childcare worker, who works at the Centenary Childcare and Early Education Centre at Mount Ommaney in west Brisbane. Dr Michael Whitby, a spokesman of Australian Medical Association (AMA) said that children’s (more than 200) visiting the center are at ri...

Socio-economically Excluded People, more affected by Tuberculosis

Health experts have warned that the increasing rate of tuberculosis, a deadly infectious disease could be reduced if it was controlled among the socially excluded groups. // In London, tuberculosis prevalence rates were found to be higher among the homeless population, drug abusers, HIV patients and prisoners, which in turn reflects on the social and economic situation in England. <...

Officer of Anti-Submarine Squadron Quarantined With Tuberculosis

A 32-year-old first-class petty officer, a member of the Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron 4, has been kept in isolation with active tuberculosis. He had returned// on July 6th after a six-month deployment aboard the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, the Navy said yesterday. The sailor became sick in early June and was initially diagnosed as having pneumonia by ship's medical staff, bu...

Palmerston Nth students to be examined for Tuberculosis

Of the 1800 pupils at a Palmerston North high school, 500 will undergo testing this week following a case of tuberculosis in the school.// The remaining students will be tested in the coming weeks. A 13-year-old student was admitted to hospital on August 16 and laboratory tests have now confirmed the boy has tuberculosis. . The skin testing of other students, teachers an...

Gluten Intolerance Quadruples Susceptibility to Tuberculosis

People who are gluten intolerant run four times the risk of developing active tuberculosis (TB) infection, suggests research published ahead of print in Thorax. // Gluten intolerance, or coeliac disease, is a chronic inflammatory condition of the small bowel, caused by an exaggerated immune response to the gluten found in wheat, barley, and rye. It affects up to 1% of the...

Kenya Resolves to Fight Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, a highly communicable disease, has turned out to be a curse on Kenya, ranked 10th among the most 'Tuberculosis' affected nations in the world. It is estimated //that nearly 300 Kenyans die each day due to the disease. This has raised the concern of Kenyan doctors and activists, who have now impressed upon the government to publicly label tuberculosis as a national debacl...

Tuberculosis: The Bacillus Takes Refuge in Adipose Cells

A team from the Institute Pasteur has recently shown that the tuberculosis bacillus hides from the immune system in its host's fat cells. //This formidable pathogen is protected against even the most powerful antibiotics in these cells, in which it may remain dormant for years. This discovery, published in PLoS ONE, sheds new light on possible strategies for fighting tuberculosis. Att...

Study Finds Link Between Smoking and Increased Risk of Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease that causes an estimated 2 million deaths each year. The majority of those deaths occur in developing countries, home to more than 900 million of the world's 1.1 billion smokers. // In addition, about half of the world's people cook and heat their homes with coal and biomass fuels such as wood, animal dung and charcoal, which generate indoor...

Tuberculosis : Growing Number of TB Cases Continuing Challenge for Thai Government

The increasing number of tuberculosis cases detected annually in Thailand is an ongoing challenge for the government, the Nation reports. //According to Somchai Pinyopornpaitch, deputy director-general of the Department of Disease Control, TB cases have increased for several years despite health officials' efforts. TB incidence in Thailand is currently 50 per 100,000 people, with 90,00...

More Youngsters Get Tuberculosis

A growing number of youngsters are contracting tuberculosis, especially those in their 20s, due to poor health from irregular// living and excessive weight loss, according to a report. Last year about one fifth of tuberculosis patients were people in their 20s. According to the report of the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 41,950 people contracted tuberc...

Tuberculosis Experts Outline Proposals to Speed Up Drug Development

Proposals to accelerate the development of tuberculosis (TB) drugs were outlined today at the conclusion of a two-day symposium titled "No Time to Wait," convened// in New York this week by the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors with the support of Howard P. Milstein and Weill Cornell Medical College's Abby and Howard P. Milstein Program in Chemical Biology. The...

Tuberculosis Case Alarms Health Officials

The state Department of Health is investigating a tuberculosis case at United World College in the northeastern New Mexico town of Montezuma and working// to prevent the spread of the disease. Officials at the college near Las Vegas notified the Department of Health that a student was hospitalized with an infectious form of the disease. Tuberculosis is a form of bacterial infe...

Scientists Partner to Develop and Distribute New Tuberculosis Vaccine

Bioengineers and public health researchers at Harvard University have developed a novel spraying method for delivering the most common tuberculosis (TB) vaccine. It// will provide a new low-cost and scaleable technique that offers needle-free delivery and greater stability at room temperature than existing methods. The process could one day provide a better approach for vaccination against TB and...

CDA Investigates Case of Bovine Tuberculosis

The Colorado Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Agriculture is investigating a case of bovine tuberculosis// (TB) out of Douglas County. 'CDA is taking quick action to ensure this disease does not spread,' said Colorado State Veterinarian John Maulsby. 'This is unfortunate but I am confident that our veterinarians and animal health officials will be able to effectively...

Mozambique: Half of Tuberculosis Cases Go Undiagnosed

The number of cases of tuberculosis diagnosed in Mozambican health units is well below the real number of infections, warned// Health Minister Ivo Garrido on Wednesday. Speaking in Maputo, at the opening of a national meeting on tuberculosis, Garrido said, "in our country, we only manage to detect about 50 per cent of people suffering from tuberculosis". In 2006, he noted, 35,...