United States: Currently, TB is both preventable and treatable, and it has a century-old vaccine that effectively disrupts transmission.
However, in 2022, more than 10 million people still succumbed to TB across the globe, from which 1.3 million lost their lives, which has made it the second most deadly infectious disease in that year.
Most prevalence areas of TB
Additionally, more than 80 percent of the cases and deaths related to TB take place in low and middle-income countries.
This is primarily because, in these countries, there is a higher probability of having risk factors like malnutrition and the HIV virus, which are linked to TB, according to vox.com.
But beyond those factors, when it comes to preventing illness and death in these regions, physicians, researchers, and public health officials say that the available vaccines and treatments don’t do enough: The vaccination is administered to babies, and it covers only a few years, which according to the health experts are not enough prevention against the disease.
Moreover, since the antibiotic treatments take long time to cure the disease, it also takes longer to recover.
Helen McShane, professor of vaccinology at the University of Oxford, where she and her team are developing a new TB vaccine among other TB research, said, “TB is a disease of poverty,” and, “There have been decades of neglect where there was no funding for new drugs or new vaccines for TB.”
About the new promising vaccine
Nonetheless, new promising and effective vaccines are being developed now, and those might save youth and adult people from TB who did not have such protection before.
For instance, these vaccines might be much better than the currently available ones. A few are now at the last stage of the clinical trials, which is phase 3.
This implies that the vaccine developers can now go ahead and apply for the authorization of their vaccines at global and local regulatory agencies.
According to Matteo Zignol, unit head of the WHO’s Global Tuberculosis Programme. The success of the first wave of vaccines has helped usher in more support and funding to the field said, “It is excellent news,” and, “We all wish [the M72/AS01E vaccine trial] is going to be a successful trial, but in any case, this is going to be like a first generation sort of new vaccine, and we really need more candidates to be able to help the epidemic.”
Need for the new vaccine
The very unusual aspect of the TB bacterium is that if you are carrying it, you do not necessarily suffer from the disease.
Moreover, in 2016, a paper was published in PLOS Medicine by researchers who stated that almost 25 percent of global populations present asymptomatic TB infection.
Mostly, those without compromised immune systems are free from such diseases for their whole lives, meaning that the bacteria do not make them sick.
Effective preventive measures like stronger sanitation, proper ventilation of the hospitals and laboratories, and proactive identification and treatment of high-risk cases on the domestic front, like in the United States in 2022, where the crude TB cases stood at around 8,000, were the driving forces that made the rates to go down, as vox.com reported.
In most poor countries, it is so sad to report that the government health system is underdeveloped, and limited resources are enough to apply the multi-faceted approach required to eradicate TB through vaccines, which is, therefore, an important player.
About the current TB vaccine
The discovery of the first and only vaccine to date against the TB bacterial agent, the Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, took place in 1921.
Because of the low number of TB cases in the USA, BCG is not routinely given to children but is used commonly in many countries.
Among young Africans and those living in Southeast Asians, who reside in the most TB-endemic regions, 80 and 91 percent received the BCG vaccine in 2022, as produced by the WHO health body.
The risks of taking the BCG vaccine are few with rare side effects; however, it doesn’t have the efficacy that is expected, as the experts stated.
One meta-analysis of 26 studies has shown that the BCG vaccine was only 37 percent successful to Children in their fist 5 years of appearing Tuberculosis after the first injection, but it has not provided protection to adolescents and adults.