Tuberculosis is a serious infection disease which causes more than two million deaths annually. The TB pandemic has continued despite widespread use of the only available licensed TB vaccine--Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG). Additionally, the increasing incidences of multidrug resistant strains and coinfection with HIV mean that tuberculosis constitutes a growing global threat. Thus, improvement...

Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) is currently the only approved vaccine against tuberculosis (TB) and is administered in over 150 countries worldwide. Despite its widespread use, the vaccine has a variable protective efficacy of 0-80%, with the lowest efficacy rates in tropical regions where TB is most prevalent. This variability is partially due to ubiquitous environmental mycobacteria (EM) found...

The mechanisms of immune protection against human TB, a disease that causes 2 million deaths world-wide each year, are not fully known. T cell immunity is critical for protection [1,2]; therefore, the current TB vaccine, bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG), and most new vaccines under development aim to induce this immunity. Most of these developmental vaccines [1–4] are designed to boost pre-existin...

INTRODUCTION In Canada, bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine is now primarily given to First Nations and Inuit (FNI) neonates living in tuberculosis (TB) endemic areas. With declining TB rates, attention has shifted from the protective effects of BCG to reports of serious vaccine-associated adverse events (VAAE). METHODS Surveillance data were reviewed to assess TB burden and trends, BCG cov...

1 The Global Health Network, Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2 Drugs for Neglected Disease Initiative (DNDi), Geneva, Switzerland, 3 Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Tropical Medicine, The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Washington, D.C., United ...

Marta-Louise Ackers, Bharat Parekh, Thomas G. Evans, Phillip Berman, Susan Phillips, Mary Allen, and J. Steven McDougal HIV Vaccine Section, Epidemiology Branch, Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention–Surveillance and Epidemiology, National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention, and HIV Immunology and Diagnostics Branch, Division of AIDS, STD, and TB Laboratory Research, National Center for Infectiou...

Despite plaguing humans for thousands of years, tuberculosis remains a widespread and lethal public health problem throughout the world today. The recent rise of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) perpetuates the public health threat while presenting a potential bioterrorism agent. The BCG vaccine is the only available prevention against TB, yet it elicits inconsistent protection when g...

The currently available vaccine for tuberculosis (TB) is ineffective in developing countries. We need to understand the pathogenesis of TB in those countries and how it differs from the pathogenesis of TB in wealthy countries, to facilitate the design and interpretation of clinical trials of new vaccine candidates that are now available. We show here that these geographical differences parallel...

The development of an effective TB vaccine remains paramount to achieving the goal of global eradication of TB by 2050. The only licensed vaccine, BCG, has variable efficacy and is poorly effective in high burden countries. The development of promising candidate vaccines to either 'boost' a BCG primed immune system or replace BCG altogether is a key area for innovative research. Here, we discus...

Tuberculosis (TB) cellular immune responses were examined in the breast milk of human immunodeficiency virus infected mothers using the T-SPOT. TB interferon-gamma release assay (IGRA). Positive TB interferon-gamma (IFN-γ) responses were detected in 6 of 8 (75%) valid breast milk assays. Among 7 mothers with paired breast milk and blood assays, TB IFN-γ responses were higher in breast milk than...