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On March 24, 1882, Dr. Robert Koch announced the discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium causing tuberculosis (TB). Koch’s achievement was the first step towards developing
tools to control TB. Despite initial success with the discovery of anti-tuberculosis chemotherapy 60 years ago, the tubercle bacillus has been a tenacious human enemy, hard to conquer, and today TB disease still kills 5,000 people daily; that is one person every 20 seconds. More than 80 percent of TB cases arise in only 22 countries, most of which are under-resourced. One-third of the world’s population is infected with M. tuberculosis, and 5 to 10 percent of infected people are likely to develop active TB; for those
infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and very young children, the likelihood of developing and dying from TB is much higher. In 2005, an estimated 1.8 million people died of TB; 195,000 were HIV co-infected. Today, fuelled by the HIV epidemic, TB disproportionately affects young adults in their most
productive years. It is pushing medical research to its limits with synergic efforts, interdisciplinary approaches, and translational research using the latest technology. M. tuberculosis and HIV co-infection produces a deadly partnership making both infections more destructive together than alone. This is most apparent in Africa where, according to World Health Organization (WHO), TB cases increase 10 percent annually in the wake of increasing levels of HIV infection and, directly and indirectly, involve increasing numbers of children. TB control programmes worldwide are increasingly faced with multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) unresponsive to treatment that may return control programmes to the pre-antibiotic era, unless care is taken of currently existing drugs and new classes of anti-tuberculosis drugs are developed.
