TB/HIV Working Group

TB/HIV Working Group Secretariat

Joint TB/HIV & MDR-TB Newsletter October Update 2009

WHO to host meeting on preventive therapy and intensified case finding for TB in people living with HIV.

The WHO HIV/AIDS and Stop TB Departments will host a joint meeting with key experts, 25-27 January 2010 to prepare guidelines on preventive therapy and intensified case finding for TB in people living with HIV. The new guidelines will update the WHO/UNAIDS 1998 Policy statement on preventive therapy against TB in people living with HIV to produce new WHO guidelines, reconceptualising TB preventive therapy and intensified TB case finding, as integral parts of HIV treatment, care and support services.

Read more: http://www.who.int/hiv/topics/tb/preventive_therapy/en/index.html

CROI 2010

The World Health Organization and the Consortium to Respond to the AIDS/TB Epidemic (CREATE) on behalf of the TB/HIV Working Group of the Stop TB Partnership will host the HIV/TB Research Frontiers meeting, the 4th in a series of research meetings affiliated with the 17th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2010) in San Francisco, USA on February 16, 2010.

This meeting will promote high level scientific interchange of ideas and research priorities to have a better understanding of scientific and implementation issues around TB prevention and isoniazid preventive therapy and discussions will also highlight ongoing research and emerging data on the impact of IPT on mortality and its implication as a primary focus but issues such as the use of skin test and the use of IPT vis-à-vis a wider and earlier use of ART as an intervention to prevent TB among PLHIV will also be addressed during the discussion.

Please click here to read the draft agenda with topics and speakers. As there are limited spaces for this meeting please confirm your participation by email to tbhiv@who.int at your earliest convenience but no later than February 10, 2010. Participation will be confirmed on a first come, first serve basis.

"The consequences of inattention to TB research are not just embarrassing, they are tragic and shameful," said Dr Tony Fauci, Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at a meeting held in Cape Town just prior to IAS2009. "Generations of research advances and technologies have bypassed the field of TB research. All of the great breakthroughs that we have seen in molecular biology - there was nobody working on it in TB. Nine million people develop active TB each year and yet we still don’t have an effective vaccine. There have been no newly licensed drugs for TB in forty years [with the exception of rifabutin]. The therapeutic regimens, although they work, are cumbersome and prone to the development of drug resistance. The diagnostics are ridiculous, they are antiquated, non-standardised and imprecise."

HATIP described earlier this year (http://www.aidsmap.com/cms1284892.pdf), that TB research has long been neglected and under funded. But the participation of Dr Fauci, Nobel Prize winner Dr Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Institut Pasteur, and many others from the HIV research establishment was a clear sign that some of the world’s pre-eminent research institutions are finally moving to make TB research a priority.

Read the full article, Catalysing HIV/TB Research: a meeting report by Theo Smart, hatip here.