Why new vaccines?
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National Library of Medicine |
Currently there is only one vaccine against tuberculosis available worldwide: Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG). This vaccine, used since 1921, can protect children from severe forms of tuberculosis. However, BCG has little to no efficacy in preventing pulmonary TB in (young) adults, the most common and most infectious form of tuberculosis. Moreover, there are serious safety concerns regarding the use of BCG in HIV infected newborns.
More effective, safe vaccines to improve or replace BCG are urgently needed as tuberculosis keeps taking its toll. TB causes nearly 1.5 million deaths a year and the burden of the disease, affecting economies worldwide, is estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Vaccines – generally accepted as and proven to be both a very efficient and cost-effective way of preventing infectious diseases – can make the difference.
Modeling studies show that without new vaccines TB can never be eliminated. New vaccines, together with more accurate diagnostics and more efficient drug therapies, would save tens of millions of lives. Vaccines will also be especially crucial in combating multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and extensively drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), forms of TB that are expensive and extremely difficult or virtually impossible to treat.
