The TARGETS Consortium and COMDIS joint address to The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Tuberculosis. Integrating TB & HIV Care in Sub-Saharan Africa: How it works in practice. Background Paper

Abstract

World TB Day 2009 (25th March) was marked by the release of dramatic new data from the World Health Organization (WHO) indicating that rates of TB-HIV co-infection are twice as high as originally estimated. In Sub-Saharan Africa, HIV has caused TB incidence to triple since the 1990s and in some countries 80% of TB patients are co-infected with HIV. A lack of integrated TB and HIV services is one of the biggest problems in controlling these two epidemics. Only 1% of people living with HIV in 2008 had been screened for TB. This presentation by DFID-funded Research Programme Consortium (RPC) partners aims to highlight some of the issues surrounding TB/HIV co-infection, and report back from key experiences in the field