Beware TB Vaccine Will Begin Tests by End of Year
by Susan Okie

Preliminary testing of a new tuberculosis vaccine in humans is expected to begin by the end of this year. The planned safety trial would mark the first time in about 80 years that a new vaccine has been tested against the tuberculosis bacterium, which infects an estimated one-third of the world's population.

In the past decade, there has been a resurgence of scientific effort and international funding to fight TB, which kills about 2 million people worldwide each year, according to health officials. However, bacterial strains that resist treatment with existing drugs are becoming increasingly prevalent, making the development of new drugs and vaccines essential to controlling the epidemic.

There were nearly 16,000 cases of TB reported in the United States last year, half of them among people born in other countries. Tuberculosis infection may remain dormant in the lungs for many years, often for a lifetime. In 5 percent to 10 percent of those infected, the disease becomes active, usually causing fever, night sweats and coughing that can transmit the bacteria to others.

Someone with active TB must take medicines daily for six to nine months to halt progression of the disease. The World Health Organization has spearheaded an approach called DOTS (directly observed treatment, short-course) to ensure that people with TB take their drugs faithfully, which increases cure rates and prevents emergence of resistant strains.

But despite expansion of the strategy, especially in China and India, where one-third of TB deaths occur, currently only 27 percent of the world's TB cases are detected and treated within DOTS programs.

The TB vaccine slated for testing in humans later this year is a new version of BCG, a partially effective vaccine introduced 80 years ago. BCG is widely used in developing countries to prevent severe TB in childhood.

Developed by California researcher Marcus Horwitz, the new vaccine is genetically engineered to prompt production of a specific bacterial protein that has been found to protect mice from the disease.
Washington Post June 4, 2002; Page A08

PHILLIP DAY'S COMMENT: Once again, common-sense nutritional and lifestyle measures to control and eradicate TB, just as with smallpox, are overlooked as jaws salivate at the prospect of scaremongering the planet into having yet another vaccine(s). TB and smallpox are both conditions which arise as a direct result of poor sanitary conditions, combined with a weakened immune system brought about by malnutrition and contaminated water supplies. Still today, a third of the planet does not have access to safe water supplies and adequate nutrition, factors that could easily be overcome with all the 'care and ministrations' directed toward the Third World.

I have to view a refusal to assist these lesser developed nations in sorting out the most basic services for their communities as rank mischief and a cynical and destructive move towards higher medicinal profits over plain common sense. When Africa is crying out for safe water apparati and basic agricultural equipment, the UN sends in the condoms. Nor is Africa itself off the hook. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe at this time is presiding over a pointless and vainglorious beggaring of his state. Hundreds of thousands go without the basics of safe food and water while millions of acres remain unfarmed around them. Until the less profitable, but straightforward, pragmatic measures are adopted, I fear we will see more of the same coming out of Africa and other nations who have placed themselves at the mercy of high-return Western strategic medical 'planning'.