Experts believe that tuberculosis, or TB, has been a scourge for humans for some 15,000 years, with the first medical documentation of the disease coming out of India around 1000 B.C.E. Today, the World Health Organization reports that TB is still the leading cause of death worldwide from a single infectious agent, responsible for some 1.5 million fatalities annually. Primary treatment for TB for the past 50 years has remained unchanged and still requires patients to take multiple drugs daily for at least six months. Successful treatment with these anti-TB drugs — taken orally or injected into the bloodstream — depends on the medications “finding their way” into pockets of TB bacteria buried deep within the lungs.

Zero TB in Tibetan Kids outreach program aims to eliminate the disease in an entire population in India.

Although relatively rare in the United States, and accounting for fewer than 5 percent of tuberculosis cases worldwide, TB of the brain--or tuberculosis meningitis (TBM)--is often deadly, always hard to treat, and a particular threat to young children. It may leave survivors with lifelong brain damage. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine report they have used PET scans, a rabbit model and a specially tagged version of the TB drug rifampin to advance physicians' understanding of this disease by showing precisely how little rifampin ever reaches the sites of TB infection in the brain.

Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a computer simulation that helps predict under which circumstances a new short-course treatment regimen for drug-resistant tuberculosis could substantially reduce the global incidence and spread of the disease.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins report they have laid the foundation to develop novel antibiotics that work against incurable, antibiotic-resistant bacteria like tuberculosis by targeting an enzyme essential to the production and integrity of bacterial cell walls.

Johns Hopkins researchers report evidence from mouse studies that a “repurposed” drug that would be expected to improve the immune system response of tuberculosis patients may be increasing resistance to the antibiotic drugs these patients must also take.

March 17, 2016 - In what investigators say is a surprise finding, results of a new study appear to strongly affirm the effectiveness of prescribing the anti-tuberculosis drug isoniazid alone — in place of the standard four-drug regimen — to prevent TB and reduce death in people with advanced HIV/AIDS infections. Those with HIV and AIDS are highly susceptible to TB.