Mycobacterium avium causes disseminated infection in patients with acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a pathogen associated with the deaths of millions of people worldwide annually. Effective therapeutic regimens exist that are limited by the emergence of drug resistance and the inability of antibiotics to kill dormant organisms. The present study describes a system using Mycobacterium smegmatis, an avirulent mycobacterium, to deliver the lytic phage TM4 where both M. avium and M. tuberculosis reside within macrophages. These results showed that treatment of M. avium-infected, as well as M. tuberculosis-infected, RAW 264.7 macrophages, with M. smegmatis transiently infected with TM4, resulted in a significant time- and titer-dependent reduction in the number of viable intracellular bacilli. In addition, the M. smegmatis vacuole harboring TM4 fuses with the M. avium vacuole in macrophages. These results suggest a potentially novel concept to kill intracellular pathogenic bacteria and warrant future development.

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One which can be transmitted by the very same Aedes mosquitoes that carry Zika-one that is neurotrophic, and extremely prevalent in Brazil-and that can disrupt brain growth, cause microcephalus, cause a fever, is sexually transmissible, instigates Guillain-Barré syndrome and causes cranial calcifications-the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, which includes the Mycobacterium africanum prevalent, yet completely ignored, in the Rhesus monkeys used in the original Zika study.

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