Professor Marcel Behr: What is Latent TB and why does it matter?
Channel: UCL TB
Date: 2021-05-20

UCL-TB  was delighted that Professor Marcel Behr from McGill University in Montreal was able to talk  to us about his thoughts on latent tuberculosis.  

Despite Mycobacterium tuberculosis being among the most lethal of human pathogens throughout human history, including the present day, there is still much we are still learning about its biology, transmission and control.  An astonishing quarter of the global population is thought to be infected, and thus at risk of developing disease in the future.  If we can detect who is developing - or likely to develop - disease, that could transform control measures.  There are now many reports where promising sets of biomarkers appear to detect subclinical disease, and this has become a fascinating but problematic area of research.  This is true both technically, where many different interpretations and nomenclatures are being proposed, and ethically, at the implications of treating people without clinical disease. Professor Marcel Behr argues that we are also hamstrung by different meanings people give to the word 'latent'.  He discusses the different ways in which this word has been used in relation to TB over the past 200 years, what we do and don't know about the disease, and how we might usefully move forward. 

The video consists of a short introduction; the talk itself starts at 3:19 and lasts 30', and there  is then a 20' Q&A starting at 34:36.  

Relevant resources:
Revisiting the timetable of tuberculosis (2018) https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k2738
Have we misunderstood TB's timeline? https://soundcloud.com/bmjpodcasts/have-we-misunderstood-tbs-timeline
Latent Tuberculosis: Two Centuries of Confusion (2021) https://doi.org/10.1164/rccm.202011-4239PP

Visit our website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/tb/
Event webpage: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/tb/events/2021/may/ucl-tb-open-seminar-professor-marcel-behr-discusses-latent-tb