A recent breakthrough in the global war against tuberculosis has not only raised hopes for the millions of people living with the disease, it has also highlighted what can be achieved through joint international medical research.
The research was conducted by a team of researchers from five countries and was led by Shanghai-based scientists, who said they found a new way to treat the world's second-deadliest infection agent (behind HIV/Aids).
Their findings were published last month in an international peer-reviewed medical journal, PLoS One, and they are of particular interest to developing countries, including China, which has about a quarter of the world's tuberculosis cases, compared with about 17.5 per cent of the global population, figures from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention show.
Scientists from China, the US, India, Kenya and Nigeria conducted the research, which was sponsored by the World Health Organisation and the governments of China and the United States.
Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis has become one of the biggest challenges facing doctors and medical researchers around the world, as it infects millions of people every year, including about 1.3 million on the mainland, where it kills about 3,000 people annually, the Ministry of Health says. WHO figures, however, are much higher.
The team was led by Dr Wang Mingwei, director of the National Centre for Drug Screening, who said they identified a potential treatment method that targeted a crucial enzyme of the stubborn bacterial disease. The discovery, they said, could inhibit the enzyme, stopping the bacteria's growth and killing it.
Wang said other scientists had discovered ways to inhibit the enzyme, but those methods did not work if applied to live tuberculosis bacterium. 'The compound we discovered not only works on the enzyme, but also works on the live tuberculosis bacterium,' he said. 'The tuberculosis cells have thick walls, appearing like wax, and many compounds can't penetrate the cell wall.
