Tb

Disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have reversed years of global progress in the fight against tuberculosis, leading to an increase in deaths from TB for the first time in over a decade, according to WHO’s 2021 Global TB report.

The use of interferon gamma release assays can reduce overdiagnosis of latent tuberculosis infection among people from countries that use the bacille Calmette-Guérin vaccine and have moderate to high rates of disease, according to a study.

Tuberculosis incidence among people aged 50 years or older in the United States is high but declining rapidly within subsequent birth cohorts, according to a study in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Just like in adult patients, ART reduces the risk that children with HIV will get or die from tuberculosis, according to data from six African countries.

As cases of tuberculosis have declined in California, patients with TB have become more complex to treat, researchers reported in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.

Among patients with rheumatic diseases, treatment with any biologic increases the risk for tuberculosis, both reactivation and new-onset, with an incidence rate among biologic users that is 10 times higher in South Africa than in European countries, according to data published in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.

A new agreement announced last week by Unitaid, the Global Fund and Sanofi drastically lowers the price of Priftin, a drug used for preventing tuberculosis, according to a press release. The pricing agreement has the potential to significantly help people in low-income countries with a high burden of disease.

Seven million people were diagnosed and treated for tuberculosis in 2018 — a more than 9% increase from 2017 and a step toward meeting one of the milestones in the U.N. plan to end the global tuberculosis epidemic, WHO reported.