The Gates Foundation notes that vaccines are the foundation of infectious disease control and represent the best hope of improving the health and well-being of the world s poorest children.
Tuberculosis is a world health problem of awe-inspiring proportions.
People infected with TB will not necessarily get sick with the disease. The disease can remain dormant for years until the individual s immune system is weakened, by old age or cancer treatments, or HIV infection, and then the chances of getting full-blown TB are considerably greater. In his research, Kornbluth will focus on treatment for this latent form of TB, in hopes of stopping it from becoming the deadly version. Kornbluth and his team will infect normal mice with a low dose of TB to create the latent form of the disease. ISS was developed by researcher Eyal Raz, M.D., of the UCSD Stein Institute for Research on Aging, who found that ISS when applied to cell cultures or delivered into animals controlled the growth of TB microbes.