The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funnelling nearly US$300 million into research to produce new tools to fight tuberculosis, an old foe whose growing resistance to existing treatments has global public health authorities seriously concerned.
The money, part of a previously announced commitment to fund US$900 million worth of tuberculosis research by 2015, is divided into 11 grants aimed at accelerating testing of potential new vaccines as well as speeding development of new drugs and diagnostic tests.
All these tools are badly needed, experts say.
"I more than welcome this type of initiative," said Dr. Mario Raviglione, head of the World Health Organization's Stop TB program.
"If we cannot diagnose TB more rapidly, if we cannot treat it with new drugs and in the end ultimately prevent it with potentially a much more effective vaccine than what we have today we're going to suffer as humanity in the face of this epidemic."
The WHO estimates that a third of the world's population is infected with TB bacilli, the germs that cause tuberculosis, and one in 10 of those people will go on to develop active disease over the course of their lifetime.
For those with access to drugs, regular tuberculosis is cumbersome to treat, requiring months of antibiotic therapy.
But strains of the bacteria have developed multi-drug resistance or even extensive drug resistance. For people newly infected with those strains - and people whose strains develop high-level resistance because they don't follow their drug regime religiously - TB can be lethal.
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