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. In most people exposed to mycobacterium tuberculosis, the agent that causes TB, the immune system walls off the TB bacteria in the lung. 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.