InterPress News Service (IPS); Thursday, 6 June 1996.
IPS Correspondents

In the lethal conjunction, tuberculosis increases the morbidity of HIV sufferers, reducing their life expectancy, while the spread of HIV itself favours the propagation of tuberculosis (TB).

Millions of TB sufferers who would previously have been cured of the active bacterium now develop the full-blown disease as their immune systems are weakened by the presence of HIV.

From 1982, when the German scientist Robert Koch reported the discovery of the TB bacterium, the illness has caused at least 200 million deaths.

AIDS, however, is a recent scourge. Only ten years ago it was practically unknown, but since then it has taken more than five million lives.

Meanwhile, approximately one in three of all the world population currently carries the germ which causes tuberculosis, with the highest rates of infection in areas of poverty and overpopulation.

In the cities with the highest population densities in the poorest developing countries the percentage of adult TB carriers stands at 80 percent of the population.

Cities are also the epicentre of the HIV epidemic. In some urban centres of Eastern Africa between 25 and 35 percent of adults are HIV positive.

Meanwhile, in the industrialised world the war on TB has caused a considerable reduction of new cases, though the increase in HIV/AIDS related cases is also happening there.

In the United States, for instance, the annual rates of TB infection was falling considerably, but since 1985 it has been bouncing back up, in direct relation to the increasing amount of HIV cases.

In Asia, the HIV epidemic has spread at an alarming speed in the last ten years, and 14 percent of the TB cases which will appear before the year 2000 will be HIV linked.

Earlier in the decade, a mere two percent were HIV related.

In Africa, where HIV first took hold in the seventies, the double epidemic has already had disastrous effects.

Some African nations have doubled and even tripled their number of TB cases since 1985, and the health systems are powerless to stop the advance.

Tuberculosis is the leading cause of death amongst African HIV sufferers, and more than five million of the current 13 million zeropositive Africans are likely to contract the disease, and four million will die from it.

TB is not only passed on to HIV patients either, as it is an airborne bacteria which also affects healthy people, though "the TB and AIDS epidemics are mutually reinforcing in a mortal interaction," according to UN HIV programme director, Peter Piot.

At present the right mix of antibiotics can be used to both prevent and cure TB, and efficient treatment rapidly reduces the risk of contagion and propagation amongst HIV victims.

The full course of medication takes six months, and when these drugs are directly administered by professional medical staff this means a complete cure in 95 percent of cases. (END/IPS/tra- so/pc/sm/96)

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