Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Programme (MLW) says tuberculosis (TB) remains a huge challenge which is pausing health risk to many lives.

A senior research clinician at MLW, Patrick Goodson, said almost every individual, more especially those from the age of 15 years and above, are exposed to the disease.

Goodson said this in Blantyre during a Journalist in Residence (JIR) program meeting where he made a presentation about M172 TB trial vaccine aimed at looking into its efficacy in protecting people who are exposed to TB from developing the active disease.

Goodson said: “The trial which will run for four years (2 years recruitment and 2 years follow up) has already started screening participants for eligibility of trial almost three weeks ago, and now we started recruiting the eligible participants.”

Apart from Malawi, other countries involved in the study which has a target of recruiting 20, 000 participants, are South Africa, Kenya, Zambia, Mozambique, Indonesia and Vietnam.

According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report, in 2023, an estimated 10.8 million people fell ill with TB worldwide, including six million men, 3.6 million women and 1.3 million children.

A total of 1.25 million people died from the disease (including 161 000 people with HIV), making it the world’s leading cause of death.