Howard Hughes Medical Institute senior scientific officer Dennis McKearin.
Stemming the rampant scourge of tuberculosis will be the global focus of a state-of-the-art international research facility, one of the most advanced in the world, which was unveiled in Durban this week.
The KZN Research Institute into TB and HIV will be officially opened on October 9, but this week it was the turn of media editors to have an exclusive preview tour of the new facility.
Its director, Bill Bishai, told guests he believed that within the walls of the new institute “a whole new chapter in TB science” would be written.
Bishai explained that the core role of the institute, a joint partnership between UKZN and the US-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute, was to find the tools to assist in the management of TB, HIV and TB/HIV co-infection.
The airy and modern eight-storey building, established on the campus of UKZN’s Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine in Umbilo Road, is fitted with some of the world’s most advanced laboratory equipment capable of investigating disease pathogens in “rigorously monitored safe and contained” environments.
Bishai said that more than 25 research scientists would be working at any one time on aspects of TB investigation.
The aim, he said, was to “conduct outstanding scientific research, and to translate these findings into new tools to control tuberculosis and HIV”.
He explained that TB diagnostic tools had not changed in 112 years, its vaccine in 91 years, and no new drugs had been developed to treat the disease since 1967.
“When you realise that eight million people a year become infected with TB, and that 2012 saw the greatest rise since records began, you can understand the enormity of the task.”
Bishai said that nearly two million people a year died of the disease, because they were not properly diagnosed, did not take the right medications, or had drug-resistant strains.
He said the facts spoke for themselves. The World Health Organisation estimates that half a million new multidrug-resistant TB cases are emerging annually.
Potentially curable, TB is transmitted through the air and infects about one third of the world’s population.
It often remains latent, causing no harm to 90 percent of those infected.
However, more than nine million people a year develop active TB, which typically causes weight loss, night sweats and lung damage. In extreme cases – usually when it is associated with HIV – it is fatal.
SA has more people infected with HIV than any other country in the world – an estimated 5.7 million by 2008. And it has one of the highest per capita rates of TB in the world.
One of the biggest challenges, Bishai said, was to broaden the understanding of the multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant strains of TB.
“In KZN, there is a large population of people with these resistant strains.”
Howard Hughes Medical Institute senior scientific officer Dennis McKearin, who attended this week’s preview, said it made sense to create a cutting-edge research scenario in areas worst hit by disease.
