• Question: Do you strive to find a cure for tuberculosis, or do you focus on preventing people form getting tuberculosis?

    Asked by Betty to Matt on 20 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by Anna.
    • Photo: Matt Bilton

      Matt Bilton answered on 20 Nov 2014:


      I would love for their to be better cures and a better vaccine!

      We actually already have some antibiotics that can cure many people of TB, but they take a long time to work and some people are starting to catch antibiotic resistant strains of the TB bacteria as well. There is a vaccine that exists as too, called the BCG vaccine, and it does protect children a bit – but it’s not very good in adults! So even with antibiotics and a vaccine against TB, there are still lots of people around the world who get sick and die..

      Right now I am not actually looking for a cure, or a vaccine – but I am studying a small bit of the immune system to just try and understand how it works in TB. If I can understand this bit, we can can take this knowledge and put it together with other scientists’ research to try and build a big picture about how the immune system fights TB – like a puzzle with lots of pieces! Maybe someone else will then be able to use this knowledge to invent a new way to treat people with TB!

      It is a lot of steps, but researching science can be very slow and take many people. The important thing is hopefully all the TB scientists together can discover new things, and together use these things to help stop people getting sick from TB and other nasty diseases.

Comments