New study claims tuberculosis can be cured permanently

A recent study claimed that tuberculosis infection isn’t permanent in nature, and can be cured completely, challenging a previous study that said that the disease can come back any time.
Based on a review of clinical studies, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues show that people who test positive with immunologic TB skin or blood tests rarely develop TB. They suggest it’s because the infecting organism, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is likely dead, wiped out naturally by people’s immune systems.
Despite that, these people retain an immunological memory to the disease, which the authors said likely explained why standard TB tests show a positive result since those tests look for an immune response and not live bacteria.
“The National Institutes of Health and other non-profit organisations spend millions of dollars on studies of the latent state because of the assumption that TB infection is life-long, held in check by the immune system,” said co-author Paul H. Edelstein, MD, an emeritus professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Penn.
“However, based on our analysis, we believe that it is rarely life-long, and in 90 per cent or more of infected people, there is no possibility of TB development even with severe immunosuppression,” added Edelstein.
Additional co-authors on the study include Marcel A. Behr, MD, a professor of Medicine at McGill University, and Lalita Ramakrishnan, MD, a professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Cambridge.
“TB immunoreactivity is not a marker for the presence of continued TB infection,” Edelstein’s team wrote. “Rather, it serves as a sign of having been infected with TB at some point.”
The researchers believe future resources should focus on developing tests that can better identify infected people who are not symptomatic. Currently, there are no specific tests for these patients.
They also believe that detecting and treating people with active TB should be a high priority, as well as providing TB preventive therapy for those around them.