Tuberculosis (TB) remains an enormous global health problem, and a new vaccine against TB more potent than the current inadequate vaccine, Mycobacterium bovis BCG, is urgently needed. We describe a recombinant BCG vaccine (rBCG30) expressing and secreting the 30-kDa major secretory protein of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the primary causative agent of TB, that affords greater survival after chal...

Tuberculosis (TB) continues to ravage humanity, causing 2 million deaths per year. A vaccine against TB more potent than the current live vaccine, bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), is desperately needed. Using two commercially available strains of BCG as host strains, BCG Connaught and Tice, we have constructed two recombinant BCG vaccines stably expressing and secreting the 30-kDa major secretor...

The chest radiograph (CXR) is considered a key diagnostic tool for pediatric tuberculosis (TB) in clinical management and endpoint determination in TB vaccine trials. We set out to compare interrater agreement for TB diagnosis in western Kenya. A pediatric pulmonologist and radiologist (experts), a medical officer (M.O), and four clinical officers (C.Os) with basic training in pediatric CXR rea...

The need for an effective TB (tuberculosis) vaccine remains acute, with tuberculosis still one of the major killers worldwide and 3 million new infections annually. We report here on the immune responses elicited by HspCs (heat-shock protein-peptide complexes) isolated from BCG (Bacille Calmette-Guérin) vaccine. These HspCs elicit both the appropriate cellular and protective immune responses re...

Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG), an attenuated vaccine derived from Mycobacterium bovis, is the current vaccine of choice against tuberculosis (TB). Despite its protection against active TB in children, BCG has failed to protect adults against TB infection and active disease development, especially in developing countries where the disease is endemic. Currently, there is a significant effort towa...

This study was carried out to control Johne’s disease (JD) without interfering with tuberculosis (TB)control programme. A dairy herd (n>1500 heads) was used over a period of 6 years, from 1994 to 1999 forthis investigation. The herd had a history of heavy infection with Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis(MAP) with culling rates of 1.5 and 5%, in 1991 and 1995, respectively. The mean annual lo...

OBJECTIVE To describe the economic benefits of a better tuberculosis (TB) vaccine by modeling prevented TB medical spending and lost productivity throughout the world. DESIGN One model is based on benefits obtained from reducing the impact of TB on health spending. An alternative model is based on minimizing the impact of TB on health spending and lost productivity due to death and disability...

The search for new and improved tuberculosis (TB) vaccines has focused on IFN-γ both for selecting antigens and for evaluating vaccine delivery strategies. The essential role of IFN-γ in endogenous host protection is well established, but it is still uncertain whether this also holds true for vaccine protection. Here we evaluate the H56 fusion protein vaccine as a BCG booster in a non-human pri...

In the last 10 yrs, work with experimental laboratory models has developed many new vaccine candidates against tuberculosis (TB). They include subunit vaccines, modified bacilli Calmette-Guérin (BCG) and attenuated Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Phase I clinical trials of new TB vaccine candidates have begun for the first time after 80 yrs of use of BCG. Many of these new trials involve recombinan...

There is a need to develop protective vaccines against tuberculosis (TB) that elicit full immune responses including mucosal immunity. Here, a live attenuated Salmonellatyphimurium aroA SL7207 vector TB vaccine, namely SL(E6-85B), harboring the Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tb) H37Rv ESAT6-Ag85B fusion gene was developed. The experimental data demonstrated that this SL(E6-85B) vaccine, or when...