Author: Aimee Cunningham / Source: Science News
A new tuberculosis vaccine shows promise in preventing the bacteria from causing disease in people who are infected, but aren’t sick. If approved, it could help control the spread of a disease considered one of the world’s top killers, responsible for 1.6 million deaths in 2017, according to the World Health Organization.
In a clinical trial, the new vaccine halved the number of people who developed active TB from latent infections of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, compared with those who received a placebo. Of 1,623 participants treated with two doses of the vaccine and followed for just over two years, 10 went on to develop tuberculosis, an incidence of 0.3 cases per 100 people per year. That’s compared with 22 participants out of 1,660 who received two placebo shots, or 0.6 cases per 100 people per year.
The results were reported online September 25 in the New England Journal of Medicine, a day before the United Nations General Assembly’s first high-level meeting on ending tuberculosis.
“The results are extremely encouraging,” says Richard Chaisson, an infectious disease physician and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis Research, who was not involved in the research….
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