MEXICO CITY, Mexico - A new vaccine to prevent tubercolosis (TB) infection could be available within the next seven years, if the current ongoing trials are successful.
Aeras Global, a TB vaccine foundation said it had very promising trials now underway for the creation of this new vaccine.

Peg Willingham, senior director for external affairs of Aeras Global said the organisation would be developing new, more effective TB vaccines by 2015 and would be ensuring that they were affordable. She said there had been no new TB vaccine in more than 80 years because the disease was considered to be a very old one.

"A new vaccine is urgently needed because BCG is not stopping the spread of TB although it does save some lives of children," she said, explaining that BCG which was given to infants shortly after birth was not known to protect against latent TB.

Willingham was addressing reporters here at the National Press Foundation Journalist to Journalist global media training prior to yesterday's start of the International AIDS Society (IAS) XVII International AIDS Conference.

TB is said to be the world's second most deadly infection after HIV and one of the leading causes of death globally.
According to Willingham, the approach to the new TB vaccine would be one of replacing the BCG vaccination. With this, babies would be given a booster vaccine 14 weeks after birth. Once they get to adoloscent stage, they would receive another.

"We think just one dose at infancy would probably not be enough," she said, adding that there was need for a vaccine that would be taken orally, which could also be in the form of an aero spray similar to an asthma pump that allowed the medication to go directly to the lungs.

TB which is spread from an infectious person through the air, affects the lungs in 80 per cent of all cases. According to World Health Organisation statistics, there has been some 8.9 million new cases of TB worldwide as of 2006, killing 1.7 million persons,

Willingham said while TB was curable, treatment was lengthy and drug resistant TB was expensive to treat. She noted that without proper treatment 90 per cent of HIV- positive persons die of TB within months of contracting the disease.

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