the Tuberculosis community of South Africa

SA's TB treatment programs failing

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:01:00 +0200

TB cure rates in South Africa have remained stubbornly low - about 60 percent nationally, but less than 50 percent in many districts. A number of studies presented at the national TB conference in Durban this week looked at some of the reasons why South Africa's programme is failing. Read full story... | Send to a friend

New target for the potential treatment of tuberculosis

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:23:00 +0200

Scientists have uncovered a new target for the potential treatment of tuberculosis (TB), finally resolving a long-running debate about how the bacterial cell wall is built. Read full story... | Send to a friend

New rapid tests for drug-resistant TB in developing countries

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:49:00 +0200

The WHO has announced that rapid tests for drug-resistant TB will soon be available in resource-poor countries. Read full story... | Send to a friend

Kenya: Displacement raises risk of drug-resistant TB

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 07:10:00 +0200

The threat of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) has been heightened by the displacement of an estimated 300,000 people in Kenya's recent political crisis, health workers have said. Read full story... | Send to a friend

Drug resistant TB patients return to hospital

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:29:00 +0200

Most of the 31 Tuberculosis (TB) patients who had run away from a hospital in Port Elizabeth to be with their families over Easter have returned. Read full story... | Send to a friend

Uganda: Only one third of TB patients cured

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:53:00 +0200

Becky Mugisha* had been ill with a hacking cough for three months before she was admitted into one of Kampala's busiest tuberculosis (TB) wards, but she recognised the symptoms long before that. It was her second bout with the disease. Read full story... | Send to a friend

Global TB - we need to do more, better

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 08:00:00 +0200

The Global Tuberculosis Control 2008, released by WHO, finds that the pace of the progress to control the tuberculosis (TB) epidemic slowed slightly in 2006, the most recent year for which data were available. Read full story... | Send to a friend

Novel, needle-free TB treatment

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 12:31:00 +0200

A novel aerosol version of the most common tuberculosis (TB) vaccine, administered directly to the lungs as an oral mist, offers significantly better protection against the disease in experiments on animals than a comparable dose of the traditional injected vaccine, researchers report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read full story... | Send to a friend

Cote d'Ivoire: Tuberculosis infections spreading

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:15:00 +0200

Tuberculosis (TB) infections in Côte d'Ivoire increased 9 percent between 2006 and 2008, and almost 10 percent of the cases were multi-drug resistant, according to new World Health Organization (WHO) and Ministry of Health data. Read full story... | Send to a friend

WHO releases report on global scale of drug-resistant TB

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 07:46:00 +0200

Drug-resistant tuberculosis accounts for about one in every 20 new cases of TB diagnosed worldwide, and the number is closer to one in every five cases in some parts of the former Soviet Union, according to a World Health Organization report released Tuesday, the Washington Post reports (Brown, Washington Post, 2/27). Read full story... | Send to a friend