The following is a guest post by  Jim Connolly,  president and CEO of Aeras, a nonprofit product development partnership dedicated to the development of tuberculosis vaccines. Aeras is located in Rockville, MD and operates an office in Cape Town, South Africa. 

The 2013 health funding bill passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee brings good news for tuberculosis research advocates, keeping funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of TB Elimination at its current $140.298 million. The Obama administration had recommended a $4.6 million cut. While about 80 percent of the CDC’s TB division funding goes to domestic programs, an estimated $14 million to $16 million goes to the Tuberculosis Trials Consortium, which works in the United States and globally to test tuberculosis treatments, including shorter term regimens and answers to multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant strains of infection.