One more step in the struggle against the tuberculosis

They already know that I like commenting here turned out really promising in the medical field although occasionally it should be necessary to give also bad news. The today case is of the good ones and it serves to us to revise the basic facts of an illness that yes is a pandemic.
We know that a third of the world population is infected by tuberculosis but the illness only will show if the bacteria manage to multiply, something that happens when the immune system loses form for any cause. The result is that between 5 and 10 % of these persons will develop the illness in some moment of his life, which translates for itself finally in almost two million deaths a year (that 1.8 millions are known registered in 2007, 4900 average deaths a day).
The bacterium of the tuberculosis (in yellow). Seizure of Flickr.
Four effective conventional medicines exist against the illness but if they are administered badly or if the treatment gives in before time it is facilitated that the called tuberculosis appears multirresistente. Against this one it is already necessary to use the called medicines of "the second generation", more expensive and with more side effects. If these other medicines keep on administering badly it can appear, if it was small, a so called variant "extremely fármacorresistente" whose treatment is already almost impossible. The appearance of resistant vines becomes more necessary still the investigation on the bases of the infection to discover new ways of catching the illness.
This is exactly what the PNAS have published a few days ago in:

Blair R. G. Gordon, et to. 2010, Lsr2 is to nucleoid-associated protein that targets AT-rich sequences and virulence genes in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. PNAS, published online (free access).

In this article about undecipherable title he communicates to himself that two things have been obtained: the first one has been to identify a mechanism by means of which the bacterium of the tuberculosis avoids the immune system; the second one was to locate a compound that blocks the aptitude of the bacterium to survive in the guest.
Both discoveries are very important because they suppose opening new ways not only in the comprehension of the illness but in the search of new ways of fighting it. Regrettably, these investigations, if they are demonstrated valid, will be late years in be reflecting in real treatments. In spite of these debts there is no any more remedy, although the espectativas are distant, that to go ahead of the resistances development in the bacteria because, very probably, these resistances will appear earlier that it is late. Things of the evolution and of the selective pressure that some of them say that they do not exist.