Statement: NIAID – World TB Day
Christine F. Sizemore, Ph.D., Richard E. Hafner, M.D., and Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health
March 24, 2012
The theme of World TB Day 2012, “Eliminate TB in My Lifetime”, boldly challenges us to improve and expand tuberculosis (TB) control and related research efforts that recently have led to slowly declining rates of illness and death from this ancient disease. Even with the technological advances available in the early part of the 21st century, the elimination of TB will be an enormous task. TB claimed 1.45 million lives worldwide in 2010, according to the World Health Organization. An estimated one-third of the world’s population is latently infected with the bacterium that causes TB, meaning they experience no symptoms but are at risk for developing active disease. Among people with HIV/AIDS, TB is a major co-infection and the leading cause of death, responsible for killing approximately 350,000 HIV-infected individuals in 2010. The interface of the TB and HIV epidemics and the continuing emergence of drug-resistant TB are serious threats to achieving TB control worldwide. Although recent progress against the disease is heartening, the control and eventual elimination of TB will require a long-term, multifaceted commitment from the global health and research communities.
TB control and the care of TB-infected people are being improved by making existing TB interventions more accessible and affordable, as well as simpler to administer. Comprehensive TB control can be markedly enhanced, however, with better medical tools. To transform the field, we must address long-standing challenges in TB research, such as identifying the factors involved in the immune control of latent TB infection that allow 90 percent of otherwise healthy TB-infected individuals to never develop active disease. We need to use novel scientific tools and apply modern approaches to answer this and other fundamental questions. High-throughput sequencing, for example, can efficiently analyze the genomes of drug-sensitive and drug-resistant TB strains and help us to identify genetic markers useful for developing tests to quickly detect resistance to anti-TB drugs. A systems biology approach helps us make sense of the complex networks of biological responses in the TB bacterium on the part of the human host so we can better understand the disease and give direction to vaccine and drug discovery projects…
An important milestone in modernizing TB control was the WHO Global Tuberculosis Control Report 2011, which for the first time included biomedical research as a critical component of the global fight against TB. Integrating biomedical research into the framework of global TB control is an essential component of the WHO report as well as other recent strategic documents developed by the TB research community, including An International Roadmap for Tuberculosis Research and the updated Strategic Blueprint for TB vaccines. These collaborative efforts to identify gaps and opportunities in biomedical research are critical for developing new interventions and control strategies…
Eliminating TB in a generation, while an ambitious goal, can become a reality through the continued commitment and collaboration of the key stakeholders in biomedical research and global health. To date, these efforts have provided the knowledge and novel methodologies to develop a robust pipeline of new TB countermeasures. Fostering even closer integration of biomedical research with the TB control community will help assure that new medical tools are applied in the most effective manner to make TB a disease of the past.
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