A Family Reunion for Tuberculosis Bugs.

This article presents information on a study related to tuberculosis. This study indicates that the disease has been around for as long as 3 million years, making it 100 times older than previously thought. Tuberculosis, an infectious disease that damages the lungs and kills approximately 2 million people each year, is caused by thousands of extremely closely related strains of bacteria collectively known as the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC). In an effort to reunite the MTBC with its extended family, M. Cristina Gutierrez of the Institut Pasteur in Paris and colleagues analyzed tuberculosis bacteria from patients in eastern Africa.