Even dormant TB beats drugs

The tuberculosis-causing bacterium - Mycobacterium tuberculosis can survive in a dormant state for many years in the body, but new understanding of how they survive in this state could lead to new treatments that could wipe out this dreaded disease.

Speaking at the Society of General Microbiology at the University of East Anglia, England on 10 September 2001, Lawrence Wayne of the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, in Long Beach, California, described how powerful drugs to treat TB have failed during the last 50 years to wipe it out. He suggested that socio-economic factors are partly to blame as well as the advent of HIV/AIDS, which destroys TB immunity. But, critical to the persistence of the disease, he added is the nature of the dormant phase of the bacteria.

 
Wayne believes that bacteria adapt their biochemistry to conserve energy, which allows them to survive without oxygen and as inflamed and infected tissues slowly run out of oxygen the bacteria stop multiplying and become dormant. "As medical scientists gain further genetic information about these adaptations," he said, "it should be possible to design drugs that will interfere with them and prevent the bacteria from surviving in oxygen-depleted tissues, solving the problem of latent tuberculosis disease".