Vaccine against Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis is a very serious illness that can, at times, have a fatal outcome. Known also as TB or MTB the disease is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which is a mycobacteria. Tuberculosis is a wide spread infectious disease and its severity mostly comes from its infectious nature as it can be caught by anyone that comes in contact with an infected person, due to a cough or a sneeze.

Tuberculosis affects about a third of the total population on the planet. Most people don’t really show signs of infection until much later after the disease was caught, and without proper treatment the Tuberculosis can progress and become lethal. This usually happens in about half of untreated cases.

There is a vaccine for Tuberculosis that is widely used around the world. Going by the name of Bacillus Calmette-Guérin or BCG for short, this vaccine is administered to a large number of people around the globe, and especially for infants. This prevention method against Tuberculosis has been used for almost a century and is the most common vaccine for TB in many parts of the world.

South Africa is where Tuberculosis can mostly be found. The MTB vaccine is administered to children under the age of 3, but BCG is not as effective in other parts of the world, like the United States. Tuberculosis has many strains, which means that it can be different in different hosts, which means that it can respond differently to the same treatment.

The BCG Tuberculosis vaccine does not work completely on every patient. There are those who may have a multi-drug-resistant Tuberculosis, which means that the prevention method should be altered. Currently there are new vaccines for Tuberculosis being developed, that are hoped to be more efficient and get the disease under control. Most of these are experimental vaccines for TB and are still being tested before a formal release.