The TB Pod

​Presented by ACTnet, our monthly podcast brings you captivating conversations with leading clinicians, researchers, and policymakers, exploring why tuberculosis remains a pressing global health concern. Our podcasts are available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or directly from our host website.

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December  - Associate Professor Sarah Bernays, co-director of the Masters of Global Health program at the University of Sydney, leads a social science research program focused on community engagement in infectious disease prevention, treatment, and care. In this episode, we explored the perspectives of tuberculosis patients, the challenges they face in accessing and receiving clinical care, and methods to identify what truly matters to them.

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November - Professor Guy Marks is a distinguished respiratory and public health physician and environmental epidemiologist.  In this episode, we delve into the essential factors for TB elimination, emphasizing the need for clinicians, researchers, and policymakers to focus on the infectious nature of TB. We explore the significance of large-scale active case finding, a strategy employed since the early 20th century, and discuss why targeted case-finding should be prioritized in middle- and low-burden countries where it proves most effective.

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October - Amanda Christensen is the Executive Director at the Australian Respiratory Council and is deeply experienced in the field of tuberculosis care. We explored the ideal attributes of TB nurses, offering perspectives on tuberculosis both within Australia and across the Pacific. 

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September - Associate Professor Patrick Phillips, University of California,  is the Co-Director of the UC Tuberculosis Research Advancement Center, Clinical & Population Health Science Core. Patrick has a wealth of statistical experience and specialises in the design, implementation, and optimisation of clinical trials for new treatments for drug-sensitive and drug-resistant tuberculosis. We explored TB RCT statistics.

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August - Handaa Enkh Amgalan is an author, TB advocate and director of QA at the International Rescue Committee in Germany who has not only recently spoken at the UN TB High Level Meeting but also written an incredible memoir of her experience being diagnosed with severe pulmonary tuberculosis as a teenager growing up in Mongolia. 

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July  - Professor Adrian Martineau from the Queen Mary University London talks to us about the limitations of current latent TB infection diagnosis and how we can do better. We purvey the frontiers in clinical tuberculosis microbiology.

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June -  Dr Carlos Martín Montañés dissected the MTBVAC. MTBVAC is an attenuated vaccine from a human mycobacterial isolate which has just progressed to a phase 3 trial and shown very promising results in the phase 2 study. 

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May  -  Professor Philip Hill, McAuley Professor of International Health at Otago University, talks about TB household contact tracing and his experience in building research capacity in TB

 

April  -  We talked with Dr Lorenzo Guglielmetti from Medecins Sans Frontiers about the END-TB trial which looks at new alloral regimens for MDR-TB

 

March  -  We discussed TB diagnostics and the future of leveraged TB technologies with Dr Morten Ruhwald, Head of the TB programme at FIND Diagnostics

 

February  -  With Dr Chris Lowbridge from Menzies School of Health we explored the amazing work of the TB teams in the Northern Territory

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January  -  We spoke with Dr Clifton Barry from NIH in Bethesda about his involvement in the PREDICT TB study, the TB Drug Accelerator and some of the most exciting drug developments in recent years.