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News Articles: TB

A patient who was diagnosed with tuberculosis holds his chest x-rays while consulting with a doctor at the Médecins Sans Frontières clinic in Mumbai, which treats people with drug-resistant tuberculosis.

TB reclaims title of deadliest infectious disease. That's an 'outrage' says WHO

DIslodged by COVID early in the pandemic, tuberculosis is once again the infectious disease that takes the most lives each year. And the number of cases set a new record. What's going on?

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By:
  • Fran Kritz
A relative adjusts the oxygen mask of a tuberculosis patient

Public health officials return to Walton High School to read TB test results

About 300 students at Walton High School in Cobb County who may have been exposed to tuberculosis (TB) underwent skin tests on Tuesday.

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Pond Inlet on Baffin Island is one of the Inuit communities in the Canadian arctic facing a TB outbreak.

Why does TB have such a hold on the Inuit communities of the Canadian Arctic?

Canada has one of the world's lowest rates of tuberculosis. Yet this deadly disease is surging among Indigenous people in this icy, remote part of the country.

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By:
  • Melody Schreiber
Munyaradzi Musvosvi, a researcher who works for the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative, in a storage facility at the University of Cape Town that holds in deep freeze the blood samples of people exposed to TB. He's part of a team working to develop a potential mRNA vaccine by looking at the immune cells in the blood samples.

Frozen cells reveal a clue for a vaccine to block the deadly TB bug

Tuberculosis kills 1.6 million a year — the second deadliest infectious disease after COVID-19. Using immune cells and mRNA technology, scientists in South Africa are working on a new vaccine.

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By:
  • Nurith Aizenman
Refugees from Ukraine, which has a high rate of tuberculosis, are often screened for the disease. Above: Dr. Natalie Wöhrle analyzes the X-ray images of the lungs from a screening in Gauting, Germany, on March 12.

Russia's war with Ukraine is devastating for Ukraine's war on TB

The country has a high rate of tuberculosis. They'd been making progress but then came the pandemic ... and now the war. Doctors worryi about increased spread of this contagious and deadly disease.

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By:
  • Ari Daniel
A patient with tuberculosis waits to be seen by a doctor at the Sizwe Tropical Diseases Hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa. Annual deaths from the infectious disease are on the rise after years of progress.

Global TB deaths are rising — and COVID gets the blame

After years of progress in reducing the number of annual deaths from tuberculosis, the number of cases of the infectious respiratory disease went up in 2020.

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By:
  • Jason Beaubien