Online tuberculosis textbook

An international team of 40 tuberculosis experts headed by Juan Carlos Palomino (Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium), Sylvia Cardoso Leao (Sao Paulo, Brazil) and Viviana Ritacco (Buenos Aires, Argentina) published an online tuberculosis textbook.

Tuberculosis 2007 is an outstanding reference source. It provides up to date insight, from the latest research findings to advances in diagnosis and treatment. It offers comprehensive coverage of all aspects of modern tuberculosis. The target group are professionals in the tuberculosis field. It is planned that the authors update the book every two years.

A team of 40 authors from Latin-America and the European Union collaborated to work out the textbook (list of authors: see attachment). The team was already participating in an EU-project on ‘Improvement of tuberculosis diagnosis, resistance detection and control in Latin-America’ since 2002. The EU-project was coordinated by the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp.

“The task began in March 2006,” says Juan Carlos Palomino, first editor of Tuberculosis 2007,”so it has been about one year of work for the team, especially for the three editors. We had to coordinate everything, starting from convincing other people to join the writing team. Sometimes it was really stressful, but we really enjoyed participating. Actually we learned a lot, from other fields in TB and from the publishing process itself. It was really an enriching experience.”