A meta analysis of whether BCG vaccination protects against Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection has found that it protects against infection and progression from infection to disease.
Our results provide evidence that BCG protects against tuberculosis infection from multiple epidemiologically different settings and independent of the type of interferon γ release assay used to detect infection. Future trials of candidate vaccines need to investigate the efficacy of the new vaccine against tuberculosis infection and early progression and late progression to active disease. In addition, transparent reporting from outbreak and contact studies of individual ages and time of vaccination and exposure to tuberculosis of participants should allow future meta-analysis to investigate protection against infection. Our results also suggest that models of BCG impact should be revised to include an effect against infection and consequently latent M tuberculosis infection and reactivation as without this the effect of BCG would be underestimated.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Hartree on Thursday August 07 2014, @02:35PM
No.
BCG has been in use widely since at least the 50s in much of the world. It's good at stopping TB infections in children. The US doesn't use it, instead using TB tests/x rays and then treating active TB with antibiotics.
This just shows that it may work a little better than what we thought. It still has a broad variability in its ability to prevent adult pulmonary TB.
Drug resistant TB (and, or patients that don't stick to the very (months) long antibiotic treatment time) is and will still be a problem.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 07 2014, @02:44PM
Having never heard of "BCG" before, this summary basically reads as, "Medicine works as advertised."
Or is this some thing like DDT where "everybody" already knows about it?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Informative) by lhsi on Thursday August 07 2014, @03:01PM
It is given to everyone in England (usually sometime in secondary school) and has been for years, I don't know about other countries. There is more information about it in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCG_vaccine [wikipedia.org]
There is a handy summary at the end of the paper:
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hoochiecoochieman on Thursday August 07 2014, @03:02PM
People in the US don't care a lot about TB because the incidence has been traditionally low in North America. In Europe, it has been a blight up until recently.
Here in Portugal, before the 1974 revolution (that brought decent nutrition and healthcare for everyone), TB was widely spread and people were scared shitless of it. Older people tell me that, by those times, if you showed up in a public place with cold sweats or a cough, everybody would stay away from you.
The BCG vaccine is in our official vaccination plan and everybody takes it (I did). Things have improved a lot regarding TB, but the problem is not solved. There's still a high incidence, specially in addicts (drugs, booze) and poor people.