BALTIMORE — Johns Hopkins Medicine has received $200 million in federal funding to head up a consortium aimed at treating and stemming spread of one of the world’s oldest and deadliest scourges: tuberculosis.
The money from the U.S. Agency for International Development, to be spent over the next five years, will boost research into diagnostics, treatments, transmission control and prevention of TB, a bacterial infection that normally infects the lungs.
The disease has a massive global impact, killing an estimated 1.5 million people a year. The World Health Organization reports the coronavirus pandemic has interrupted detection efforts, and case reports were down 20% last year, though death rates rose for the first time since 2012.
