Researchers have discovered a vaccine that can prevent tuberculosis (TB) in people of all ages. This could fundamentally alter healthcare delivery, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. There are a lot of cases of tuberculosis (TB) in South Africa. TB is still the most common infectious disease killer in the world. 

Adults and teens are at risk because the current BCG vaccine, which is usually given to babies, only protects in some places and for a short time. South Africa has promised to get rid of TB by 2030, which is a Sustainable Development Goal. The professor, Bavesh Kana, said, "We need to do much better to reach the milestones, even though we are doing pretty well as a country—TB deaths have gone down since 2015." Kana made important contributions to the groundbreaking work. He was head of the school of pathology and former director of Wits University's Centre of Excellence for Biomedical TB Research.

Scientists want to make the BCG vaccine even better at stopping the spread of M. tuberculosis. Their efforts paid off because the modified BCG vaccine prevented M. tuberculosis from growing in the lungs of animals that received it, compared to mice that received the original vaccine. Kana adds, "In the fight against this deadly disease, we can now offer a new candidate vaccine." Additionally, the study shows that changing genes is a possible way to create vaccines. This is very important for experts making vaccines. 

Research has shown that administering the BCG vaccine to babies at birth can prevent them from contracting TB. Therefore, we require new vaccines, as the current ones do not provide protection to adults or teens, nor do they effectively eradicate TB. "It is also evident that BCG can elude the immune system, which diminishes its effectiveness as a vaccination," Kana points out. He talks a lot about how important vaccines are for public health, saying that they make the immune system ready to find and fight infections without putting people's health at risk. 

Kana discusses how expensive it is to develop drugs for tuberculosis (TB), a nearly 9,000-year-old disease. Our diagnostic methods were 100 years old until not long ago. Now that several new vaccine options are being developed, we can start to effectively fight this terrible disease. 

Finding this new possible TB vaccine is very important, especially in low- and middle-income countries where TB is most common. Better vaccination schemes could cut the number of people who get tuberculosis (TB) and the number of people who die from it by a large amount. This would help governments end the pandemic and improve the quality of healthcare for millions of people.