Tuberculosis (TB) and HIV pose a deadly combination for millions of people in Africa, but a coordinated assault on both diseases can save up to 500,000 lives a year on the continent, experts gathered in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa said today, according to the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).
Tuberculosis (TB) and HIV pose a deadly combination for millions of people in Africa, but a coordinated assault on both diseases can save up to 500,000 lives a year on the continent, experts gathered in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa said today, according to the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).
WHO said the introduction of HIV testing and AIDS drugs into TB programmes is one of the most cost-effective ways to ensure the survival of HIV-positive people.
Joint TB and HIV interventions are among the best ways to accelerate access to anti-retroviral drugs and to help reach the "3 by 5" target of three million people on HIV treatment by the end of 2005, according to UN officials.
“If we jointly tackle TB and HIV, we can be much more effective in controlling both diseases,” declared Dr. Peter Piot, head of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
Of the estimated 25 million Africans now living with HIV, about 8 million also harbour the bacillus that causes TB. Each year, 5 to 10 per cent of these eight million co-infected people develop active TB and up to half, or 4 million, will develop the disease at some point in their lives.
Without TB treatment, HIV infected people with TB typically die within months. Yet national TB programmes in Africa are currently treating fewer than half of HIV-positive people with active TB - despite the fact that they respond just as well to TB treatment as HIV-negative people, and the cost of TB drugs is as low as $10 per patient. But few TB patients are currently offered an HIV test, and only a handful receive anti-AIDS drugs. WHO advocates providing those anti-retrovirals to HIV infected TB patients.
“As we scale up efforts to increase access to ARVs in Africa we must simultaneously help people living with HIV survive their bouts episodes with tuberculosis,” said WHO’s Jack Chow. "This is one of the most effective ways we can help save lives in Africa."
The lack of attention to the risk TB poses for people living with HIV was highlighted by Nelson Mandela at the recent XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok in July. "TB is too often a death sentence for people with AIDS," he said. "Today we are calling on the world to recognize that we can't fight AIDS unless we do much more to fight TB as well."