OTTAWA, Oct 2, 2008 (AFP) - Canadian public health officials were on the hunt Thursday for 27 bus passengers who came in contact with a man diagnosed with infectious tuberculosis on a US-bound bus.

The infected passenger was traveling on a Greyhound bus from Toronto to Detroit, trip number 0367.

PARIS, September 14, 2008 (AFP) - Scientists have figured out how tuberculosis tricks the immune system, a discovery that could lead to new anti-TB drugs, according to a study published Sunday.

In experiments with mice, they identified a key mechanism whereby TB bacteria provoke a form of death in host cells that enables the infection to spread through the lungs, they reported.

MEXICO CITY, August 4, 2008 (AFP) - Requests for cash from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria currently total 6.4 billion dollars, a record amount that is triple the level of previous years, the fund said Monday.

PARIS, August 3, 2008 (AFP) - A drug used to fight tuberculosis also hampers the effectiveness of an HIV treatment widely used in Africa, the world's worst AIDS-hit region, a study published on Sunday said.

HONG KONG, June 29, 2008 (AFP) - British and Hong Kong health authorities are urgently tracing people who came into contact with a woman who died of TB after flying home from the Chinese city, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

UNITED NATIONS, June 9, 2008 (AFP) - People suffering from both AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) are more likely to die of TB, a Zambian infected with HIV said here Monday.

Winstone Zulu, an AIDS/TB activist, told a press conference that four brothers, who like him were diagnosed with both AIDS and tuberculosis, had died because they did not have access to treatment for TB.

JOHANNESBURG, March 28, 2008 (AFP) - South Africa on Friday launched a four million dollar programme to track down tuberculosis patients who have defaulted treatment, leading to resistant strains of the illness.

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy, March 24, 2008 (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI said he was 'particularly close' to those sick with tuberculosis following Easter prayers which coincide with the World Tuberculosis Day.

MANILA, March 19, 2008 (AFP) - Inadequate laboratory facilities in Asia and the Pacific are fuelling the spread of drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, the World Health Organisation said Wednesday.

GENEVA, March 17, 2008 (AFP) - The World Health Organisation warned Monday that more new tuberculosis cases are slipping through the detection net, as countries fail to keep up with rapid progress made in earlier years.

WASHINGTON, Feb 26, 2008 (AFP) - Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis have been recorded at their highest rates ever around the globe amid shortages in funding needed to combat the disease, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

CAPE TOWN, Jan 27, 2008 (AFP) - A guard in a surgical mask patrols a wire fence designed to keep dozens of patients with a lethal form of tuberculosis at Cape Town's Brooklyn Chest hospital isolated from the rest of the world.

WASHINGTON, Dec 15, 2007 (AFP) - Eleven Asian nations facing the biggest threat from tuberculosis risk being saddled with a whopping trillion dollar economic burden over the next 10 years if they do not beef up their anti-TB strategy, a landmark study shows.

OTTAWA, Nov 28, 2007 (AFP) - Passengers who sat near a fellow traveler with a particularly virulent strain of tuberculosis on flights six months ago have not developed the disease and should not expect to, authorities said Wednesday.

CAPE TOWN, Nov 12, 2007 (AFP) - Fifty years after it was thought to have been contained, tuberculosis (TB) has re-emerged as a ruthless killer claiming a life every 20 seconds, a global lung health conference has heard.

GENEVA, Nov 12, 2007 (AFP) - The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria on Monday said it has approved 73 new grants worth more than 1.1 billion dollars (757 million euros) in developing countries over the next two years.

MONTREAL, Nov 10, 2007 (AFP) - A case of bovine tuberculosis was discovered on a farm in western Canada, prompting 28 farms to go under quarantine as authorities try to determine if the disease has spread, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Saturday.

CAPE TOWN, Nov 9, 2007 (AFP) - Territorial jealousy between national AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) programmes was claiming thousands of lives world-wide, activists and experts said at a global lung health conference in Cape Town on Friday.

CAPE TOWN, Nov 9, 2007 (AFP) - Smoking may be responsible for up to a fifth of tuberculosis (TB) infections and deaths world-wide, according to research presented at a global lung health conference in Cape Town on Friday.

CAPE TOWN, Nov 9, 2007 (AFP) - Smoking may be responsible for up to a fifth of tuberculosis (TB) infections and deaths world-wide, according to research presented at a global lung health conference in Cape Town on Friday.

CAPE TOWN, Nov 8, 2007 (AFP) - Growing resistance to available tuberculosis (TB) drugs is threatening the world with a new untreatable strain of the deadly disease, experts said at a global lung health conference on Thursday.

CAPE TOWN, Nov 8, 2007 (AFP) - Clinical trials were being done with two drugs promising to shorten and simplify tuberculosis treatment, the developers said Thursday on the sidelines of a global lung health conference in Cape Town.

CAPE TOWN, Nov 6, 2007 (AFP) - The looming threat of an untreatable strain of tuberculosis emerging as the disease becomes ever more drug resistant will occupy the minds of some 3,000 experts at a conference in Cape Town this week.

PARIS, Nov 2, 2007 (AFP) - Drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV have merged into a double-barreled epidemic that is sweeping across sub-Saharan Africa and threatening global efforts to eradicate both diseases, according to a report released Friday.

PARIS, Oct 26, 2007 (AFP) - An epidemic of deadly drug-resistant tuberculosis has spread from South African hospitals, but a mix of simple preventative measures could cut the number of future cases in half, according to a study released Friday.

Extensively drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis has emerged over the last decade as a major health concern around the world, especially in poorer nations.

JOHANNESBURG, Oct 11, 2007 (AFP) - South African scientists announced a major breakthrough on Thursday in the fight against a deadly strain of drug resistant tuberculosis, sequencing the genome in a week.

Using technology worth five million rand (750,000 dollars / 520,000 euros) brought in from the United States, a group of scientists working for a government sponsored research centre decoded and sequenced the strain, which would have ordinarily taken a year.

The research breakthrough has the potential eventually to lead to a cure, scientists hope.

GENEVA, Oct 8, 2007 (AFP) - Two international drug funds said Monday that they had stepped in to provide 26 million dollars in life-saving tuberculosis treatment for three quarters of a million people in poor countries.

UNITAID and the Stop TB partnership said they were trying to prevent a hazardous gap in treatment for patients in 19 countries in Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

CHICAGO, Sept 18, 2007 (AFP) - A new regime of antibiotic drugs appears to dramatically shorten the time needed to cure highly infectious and deadly tuberculosis from six months to just four, according to research unveiled at a medical conference on Tuesday.

A team of Brazilian and US TB experts reported at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology that adding the drug moxifloxacin to a standard cocktail of antibiotics increased by 17 percent the number of patients who cleared active TB infection from their lungs, from 68 to 85 percent.

CHICAGO, Sept 18, 2007 (AFP) - The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Tuesday announced that it was donating 280 million dollars over five years to finance research on combating tuberculosis.

The funding is to be shared between 11 separate grants covering TB vaccines, diagnostic tests, and medications, comes with the dread lung ailment on the rise.

Tuberculosis kills some two million people each year, mostly in developing countries.

CHICAGO, Sept 18, 2007 (AFP) - A new regime of antibiotic drugs appears to dramatically shorten the time needed to cure tuberculosis from six months to just four, according to research unveiled at a medical conference here Tuesday.

A team of Brazilian and US TB experts reported at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology that adding the drug moxifloxacin to a standard cocktail of antibiotics increased by 17 percent the number of patients who cleared active TB infection from their lungs, to 68 percent from 85 percent.

SEOUL, Sept 12, 2007 (AFP) - A top World Health Organization (WHO) official urged Asia-Pacific countries on Wednesday to step up their fight against growing outbreaks of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.

Shigeru Omi, regional director for the Western Pacific, also called for immediate action to prevent the development of extensively drug resistant-TB or XDR-TB in the region.

'There is an urgent need to scale up the management of multidrug resistant-TB, which has emerged across the region, including the Pacific,' said Omi.

DENVER, July 26, 2007 (AFP) - A US lawyer who sparked a global health scare by crossing the Atlantic while infected with a potentially lethal tuberculosis strain emerged Thursday from weeks of hospital isolation, the clinic said.

The National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, Colorado, discharged Andrew Speaker 'after the successful completion of his in-patient treatment for multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis,' it said in a statement.