A New TB vaccine investigated, after resurgence of Active TB Cases reaches all time high in history

A “new vaccine offers hope of a tuberculosis breakthrough”, reported The Independent today. The newspaper said that the existing vaccine against TB (the BCG vaccine), “provides some protection against childhood forms of the infection, but is unreliable against the adult lung disease, which is steadily spreading”.

Injecting modified bacteria related to those which cause tuberculosis could protect against the lung disease, US scientists say.

Experiments on mice showed the injections could completely eliminate tuberculosis bacteria in some cases, Nature Medicine reports.

TB vaccination for all London newborns proposed

All newborn children in London could be vaccinated to reduce the spread of tuberculosis (TB), under proposals that are out for consultation.

Cases of TB have risen 50% in the capital, according to London Health Programmes (LHP), which has produced the draft plan.

LHP hopes its range of proposals, which also includes targeted testing, will help to cut the rate of the respiratory illness by 50% over the next 10 years.

The consultation runs until 13 July.

London has the poorest rate of cases of TB in Britain at 40 per 100,000 people, and it is also one of the worst in Western Europe.

‘Serious issue’

The BCG jab was discontinued for school children in 2005, after it was deemed unnecessary.

Other proposals include improved early identification of people with infectious TB, targeted testing and treatment of latent TB infection and an awareness and education programme.

A Department of Health spokesman said: “We recognise that tuberculosis is a serious issue in London, particularly in more deprived boroughs and among the migrant community.

“We welcome the consultation on the draft TB Plan for London.

The only TB vaccine – the BCG jab – is not very effective.

The research is in its early stages and the potential for a human vaccine is unknown, campaign group TB Alert says.  Tuberculosis is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It is one of the top 10 leading causes of death, according to the World Health Organization, killing 1.7 million people each year.

The BCG vaccine has variable results. It has been shown to be between 0% and 80% effective in different parts of the world.  There are also potential problems giving the live vaccine to some of the most at risk patients – those with HIV.more

Worldwide number of new TB cases is higher than any other time in history thank you Jason

 From the 2011 Lancet review:

The worldwide number of new TB cases is more than 9 million – higher than at any other time in history.   22 low-income and middle-income countries account for more than 80% of the active cases in the world.

Due to the devastating effect of HIV on susceptibility to TB, sub-Saharan Africa has been disproportionately affected and accounts for 4 of every 5 cases of HIV-associated tuberculosis.

Management problems include:

- In highly endemic areas, TB diagnosis continues to rely on century-old sputum microscopy

- No vaccine with adequate effectiveness (although BCG works to some extent). According to a recent report, BCG vaccination not only protects against tuberculosis but the number needed to treat (NNT) is 11.

- TB treatment regimens are protracted and have a risk of toxic effects

- Increasing rates of drug-resistant tuberculosis in eastern Europe, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa

Promising progress includes improved tuberculosis diagnostics with biomarkers of disease activity. New and improved drugs, biomarkers, and vaccines need to be developed.

10 of the Craziest Things That You Never Knew About Quarantines

If you’re worried about catching a super-virus, you can always be extra careful about washing your hands. But sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes you just need to get all those sick people away from you. This idea has fueled many successful — and unsuccessful — quarantines over the years. Here are the strangest, sickest, and silliest things that have been done in the name of quaratines.

10. Seeking out people to quarantine was a profession

Since the plague was a fact of life for hundreds of years in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, quarantines weren’t special emergency measures but everyday events. Since no one volunteers for quarantine, those with the plague had to be found out. People, usually old women without any other income, would search dead bodies, wherever they happened to be gathered, and look for plague victims. When they found them, they’d announce it to a local official, get paid a few pence a body, and the family that the body belonged to would get boarded up in their house.

9. Typhoid Mary spent the last 24 years of her life in quarantine

Mary Mallon was an asymptomatic carrier of the typhoid pathogen. Although she was never sick during her life, it’s possible she was a carrier since birth and that her mother suffered from typhoid. She came to New York at the turn of the century, and had infected multiple people in every household she cooked for with typhoid before she was found to be a carrier and quarantined for three years. After that time she was released, on the condition that she not work as a cook anymore. Instead she took an alias, Mary Brown, and cooked for a women’s hospital, infecting over twenty people and, it is thought, causing one death. She was discovered and returned to quarantine for the rest of her life. She died in 1938.

8. A quarantine was once lifted by the courts because it was racist

And lifted justifiably, too. In 1900, the Chinese owner of a lumberyard died in Chinatown in San Francisco. When the cause of death was determined to be bubonic plague, the entire neighborhood was closed off, trapping 25,000 residents inside. Just for good measure, San Francisco closed all ‘non-white owned’ businesses. A judge eventually lifted the quarantine, finding it to be unfair.