Vaccinating Against TB: At Home and Abroad
By Katy Lenard, August 5, 2015
Scanning electron micrograph of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which cause TB.
Recently Burness’ hometown of Bethesda, Maryland, became home to a disease most of us don’t associate with this part of the world: tuberculosis. The extensively drug-resistant kind.
Local and national news reported that a woman, who had flown to three U.S. states from India, was currently being treated for XDR-TB at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Bethesda facilities.
While a case of TB in the U.S. is indeed a newsworthy event, especially multidrug-resistant (MDR) or XDR-TB, throughout the world, nine million people are diagnosed with active TB every year—and 1.5 million die. HIV kills just as many people.
And although TB is a disease that mostly persists in the impoverished regions of the world, the threat to the U.S. from an outbreak of MDR- or XDR-TB is quite real. For many of us, this story was an alarming reminder of the reality of this deadly epidemic—one that’s just a plane ride away.
The growing incidence of drug-resistant TB strains, as well as the fact that it’s spread through coughing and sneezing, makes it a tremendous public health threat. Even worse, MDR- and XDR-TB are much more difficult and more expensive to treat: courses of treatment can be painful, take two years or more, and cause serious side effects, including deafness.
A vaccine called BCG does exist, and while it’s moderately effective in preventing severe TB in infants and young children, it does not adequately protect teens and adults, who are most at risk for developing and spreading TB. The World Health Organization has stated that a new vaccine, as well as new drugs and diagnostics, is critically needed to halt the TB epidemic.
It turns out, though, that just a few miles away from the XDR-TB patient at the NIH, in Rockville, Maryland, a non-profit biotech called Aeras has been hard at work to develop new vaccines for TB.
NBC4 in Washington, DC, visited Aeras’ facilities in the wake of the patient’s hospitalization, to showcase how its research could one day prevent deaths from tuberculosis, both near and far.
