Carol Nyirenda
CITAMplus

My name is Carol Kachenga. I'm from Zambia. I work for an organization called CITAMplus, which is a patient led organization and I'm executive director there.

Being a TB survivor, I've been involved in a lot of work around TB, and I'm currently also a board member on the Stop TB Partnership Board representing affected communities as well as on the TB patient global organization called TBpeople.

So to start our discussion today, I'll ask a question about what are the limitations of the BCG vaccine.

When we think of polio, smallpox, measles, flu, or COVID-19, vaccines are incredibly powerful tools for reducing or eliminating diseases. Vaccines have save countless lives. Having a new and effective vaccine is essential to ending TB. With this single intervention modeling shows that we can make an enormous impact on the TB epidemic. A new vaccine would also help to protect vulnerable populations from TB, including infants and people who are immunocompromised through herd immunity.

Today, there is only one approved vaccine for TB called BCG. The BCG vaccine was introduced more than 100 years ago. And while the BCG vaccine helps to prevent certain severe kinds of TB in infant like TB meningitis, it has a major limitation that keeps it from being the effective vaccine that we need.

The BCG vaccine does not protect people from getting sick with TB or from dying from TB later in life. By the time people become adolescents and then adults, they have no real protection anymore from the BCG vaccine. This is one of the reasons why we need more
vaccines because, though BCG is one of the most widely used vaccines in the world, yet TB continues to be one of the leading causes of death.

In addition to technical limitations of the BCG vaccine today, we also face challenges due to lack of funding for research into new vaccines.