Ten years of research progress and what's to come

There has been a renaissance in interest in tuberculosis research over the last decade. A search of the National Library of Medicine database records an output of 246 papers on Mycobacterium tuberculosis in 1980. This had risen to 615 in 1990, to over 1000 in 1995, and to 1537 in the year 2000. This increase has been stimulated by heightened awareness amongst the research community of the magnitude of the global burden of tuberculosis, by increased funding, and by new scientific opportunities provided by advances in genomics and in cellular immunology.