Brucellosis

MANKATO — Blue Earth County’s chlamydia rate in 2018 was the second highest in the state, continuing a four-year rise in cases for the sexually transmitted disease. The county had 455 chlamydia cases last year, equaling 711 per 100,000 residents, according to the Minnesota Department of Health’s annual STD surveillance report. Since 2015, the county has had a 50 percent increase in total chlamydia cases. Chlamydia is the top reported infectious disease in the state, increasing by 2% last year with 23,564 cases statewide. Minnesotans between ages 15-34 accounted for 83 percent of all the chlamydia cases. A 2015 report by the Minnesota State Demographic Center found Blue Earth County had by far the most 18- to 34-year-olds per capita of any county in the state, a likely contributor to the the high local rate. One of the leading STD test providers, the Planned Parenthood health center in Mankato, distributed 7,723 STD tests last year. Shannon Bakshian, Planned Parenthood’s senior d...

In Australia, there are approximately 260,000 Australians currently living with Chlamydia (also known as Chlamydia trachomatis). And with condom use with sexual partners on the decline, many more are at risk of the sexually transmitted disease dubbed the 'silent infection'. Unfortunately, around  50 percent of men and 80 percent of women  are diagnosed without symptoms, leaving them at risk of permanent damage. With many cases of the sexually transmitted infection resulting in no symptoms, untreated chlamydia can put men at risk of pain and swelling in one or both testicles or more seriously, infertility.  Unlike some sexually transmitted infections, Chlamydia doesn't discriminate. Men can catch chlamydia from having vaginal sex, anal sex and also through oral sex - basically, all means of sexual contact. While condoms are not 100 per cent effective and don't guarantee keeping away sexually transmitted infections, using p...

Lead investigator Xiaolei Wang is an assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Tulane National Primate Research Center. Tuberculosis, the world’s leading infectious disease killer, is also the leading cause of death in infants with HIV. Researchers at Tulane National Primate Research Center will use a new $6.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to better understand how the developing immune system responds to the two diseases so that doctors can improve outcomes for infants and children across the globe. According to UNAIDS, 1.8 million children are currently living with HIV/AIDS. HIV is usually transmitted to infants at birth, and the untreated disease leaves their immune systems particularly vulnerable to an infection as devastating as tuberculosis. This is of particular concern in low-resource countries, where the lack of treatment for HIV greatly accelerates the progress and spread of tuberculosis. While the progression of tuberculosis in...

Citation: Hatherill M, Chaisson RE, Denkinger CM (2019) Addressing critical needs in the fight to end tuberculosis with innovative tools and strategies. PLoS Med 16(4): e1002795. http://bit.ly/2GSto6G Published: April 30, 2019 Copyright: © 2019 Hatherill et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: REC, CMD, and MH are Guest Editors on the PLOS Medicine Tuberculosis Special Issue. Their competing interests can be found at: https://collections.plos.org/s/tb-special-issue-guest-editors . Abbreviations: BCG, Bacille Calmette Guerin; DST, drug susceptibility testing; LAM, Lipoarabinomannan; M...

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the world’s deadliest diseases, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Close to 10 million people were infected with it in 2017, a year during which there were 1.3 million reported TB-related deaths. Making matters worse, the bacterium that causes TB — mycobacterium tuberculosis — is difficult to target, due to its ability to develop a resistance to certain drugs. Fortunately, researchers at Harvard Medical School’s Blavatnik Institute have devised a computational approach capable of detecting resistance to commonly used TB drugs pre-treatment. In experiments, they managed to accurately anticipate a TB strain’s resistance to 10 first- and second-line drugs in a tenth of a second and with greater precision than similar models. The method is described in the journal EBioMedicine and will be added to Harvard Medical School’s genTB  tool, which analyzes TB data and predicts TB drug resistance. “Drug-resistant forms of TB are...

What happened to the incubation periods at quarantine stations in Ellis Island? Why does coming here illegally exempt aliens from the laws on the books that make them inadmissible until we know they are not a threat? On Sunday, Aaron Hull, chief patrol agent of the El Paso sector, divulged to the public what we already suspected but most government officials assiduously covered up. The head of the second busiest illegal immigration corridor told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is increasingly “caring for more and more sick people, because a lot of these aliens coming in are carrying contagious health conditions, things like chicken pox, scabies, tuberculosis, lice.” Tuberculosis. That is the disease we sought to eradicate through our laws as early as 1907 by requiring every prospective immigrant to wait at Ellis Island, away from the population, until they got the green light to enter. That is a far cry from what a CBP official told me two weeks ...

Abstract Background Tuberculosis (TB) still represents a major public health problem in Latin America, with low success and high default rates. Poor adherence represents a major threat for TB control and promotes emergence of drug-resistant TB. Expanding social protection programs could have a substantial effect on the global burden of TB; however, there is little evidence to evaluate the outcomes of socioeconomic support interventions. This study evaluated the effect of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) policy on treatment success and default rates in a prospective cohort of socioeconomically disadvantaged patients. Methods and findings Data were collected on adult patients with first diagnosis of pulmonary TB starting treatment in public healthcare facilities (HCFs) from 16 health departments with high TB burden in Buenos Aires who were followed until treatment completion or abandonment. The main exposure of interest was the registration to receive the CCT. Other covariates,...

Abstract Background Accurate, comprehensive, and timely detection of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) is essential to inform patient treatment and enable public health surveillance. This is crucial for effective control of TB globally. Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) and targeted next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches have potential as rapid in vitro diagnostics (IVDs), but the complexity of workflows, interpretation of results, high costs, and vulnerability of instrumentation have been barriers to broad uptake outside of reference laboratories, especially in low- and middle-income countries. A new, solid-state, tabletop sequencing instrument, Illumina iSeq100, has the potential to decentralize NGS for individual patient care. Methods and findings In this study, we evaluated WGS and targeted NGS for TB on both the new iSeq100 and the widely used MiSeq (both manufactured by Illumina) and compared sequencing performance, costs, and usability. We utilized DNA libraries produced...