A Look at Tuberculosis and Its Relationship to HIV/AIDS

Abstract

As nursing students in the 1970s my classmates and I were told that tuberculosis (TB) was on the verge of being eradicated globally. At that time TB could have been definitively diagnosed and affordably treated with standard affordable first-line drugs. Unfortunately that possibility was never realized. The growing TB epidemic was a pervasive theme at The XVI International AIDS Conference. At the conference it was reported that two billion people one third of the worlds population are believed to be infected with TB. Each year 8 million people develop active TB and nearly 2 million people with active TB die. In 2005 14093 cases of active TB were diagnosed in the United States and it is believed that as many as 15 million U.S. residents are latently infected with TB. TB and HIV/AIDS are inseparably linked and these infections occur most frequently in economically deprived regions of the developing world. The immunodeficiency caused by HIV infection reactivates latent TB infection and accelerates the progression of newly acquired TB. TB is one of the defining illnesses that marks the progression of HIV infection to AIDS and it is responsible for one third of all HIV-related deaths making it the leading cause of death for persons living with AIDS. (excerpt)