Alpha-1-antitrypsin (AAT) anomalies are associated with lung disease due to rapidly growing mycobacteria and AAT inhibits Mycobacterium abscessus infection of macrophages.

Rapidly growing mycobacteria (RGM) are ubiquitous in the environment but cause lung disease in only a fraction of exposed individuals. This variable susceptibility to disease implies vulnerability to RGM infection due to weakness in host defense. Since most persons who contract RGM lung disease have no known host defense defect, it is likely that uncharacterized host deficiencies exist that predispose to RGM infection.

Cough-generated aerosols of Mycobacterium tuberculosis: a new method to study infectiousness.

The concentration and size distribution of infectious aerosols produced by patients with pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) has never been directly measured. We aimed to assess the feasibility of a method that we developed to collect and quantify culturable cough-generated aerosols of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Subjects were recruited from a referral hospital and most had multidrug-resistant TB.