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Tuberculosis - collaboration to target disease

Cornelia BorrmannAugust 29, 2013

German and South African scientists are collaborating in Durban to find new ways of fighting tuberculosis, or TB.

https://p.dw.com/p/19YJC
A doctor examines chest X-rays at a tuberculosis clinic in Gugulethu, Cape Town, South Africa, Friday, Nov. 9, 2007. South Africa reported 343,000 TB cases in 2006, of which an estimated 6,000 were multi-drug-resistant. The government says that there have been about 400 cases of XDR-TB (extremely-drug-resistant tuberculosis), but groups like Medecins Sans Frontieres say this is a big underestimate. (ddp images/AP Photo/Karin Schermbrucker)
Image: AP

For the past 20 years the number of cases of TB has been on the rise, in part because conventional antibiotic treatment has become less and less effective. South Africa is a region especially badly affected by TB. Stefan H.E. Kaufmann, who heads the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, has set up a research group there in collaboration with the University of KwaZulu-Natal and an American biomedical research institute.

Tuberculosis - research collaboration to target a killer disease