Remodeling the immune system to fight tuberculosis sciencedaily.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sciencedaily.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
<p>Tuberculosis, caused by the bacterium <em>Mycobacterium tuberculosis</em> (Mtb) kills upwards of 1.6 million people a year, making it one of the leading causes of death by an infectious agent worldwide—and that number is only growing larger. How, exactly, Mtb evades the immune system isn’t yet known, but a collaborative team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Seattle Children’s Research Institute recently discovered something surprising: prior exposure to a genus of bacteria called <em>Mycobacterium</em> seems to remodel the first-line defenders in the body’s immune system. Furthermore, how those cells are remodeled depends on exactly how the body is exposed. These results, published recently in <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1011871"><em>PLOS Pathogens</em></a><em>,</em> suggest that a more