title: Tuberculosis vaccine research in China.
abstract: It is now privately acknowledged that there may be little if any perceptible impact of the national Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccination program on disease prevalence, despite the extensive coverage of the newborn infant population and likely benefit in the early years of life. A better preventive vaccine than BCG is now being sought by Chinese researchers. Urgency has been added to the control problem by the emergence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (TB). Furthermore, expensive second-line drugs seem unlikely to be made available by the government to treat drug-resistant cases, so attention in addition has turned to the potential of immunotherapy as an adjunct to chemotherapy. Research trends are summarized here.
authors.affiliation: Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, Fudan University , Shanghai 201508, China.
authors.forename: Douglas B
authors.initials: DB
authors.lastname: Lowrie
keywords: immunotherapies; tuberculosis; vaccines