PHA-Exch> Drop in TB funding could set back fight against AIDS

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: Vern Weitzel <vern.weitzel at gmail.com>
crossposted from: "[health-vn discussion group]" health-vn at cairo.anu.edu.au


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-tb15-2008oct15,0,7713869.story

About 11 million of 33 million HIV-positive people have TB, a Nobel laureate
warns, and if financially troubled nations renege on aid pledges, it would
deprive the poor of treatment.

Mary Engel, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Fearing that the global economic crisis could cause nations to renege on
commitments to fight tuberculosis, new Nobel laureate and HIV co-discoverer
Francoise Barre-Sinoussi warned that a drop in TB funding could wipe out
gains made against AIDS because so many people suffer from both diseases.

"We are at the period of success with antiretroviral treatment" for HIV,
Barre-Sinoussi said Tuesday during a teleconference from the Pasteur
Institute in Paris. "But we have an epidemic of multi-resistance to
tuberculosis treatment, which is really alarming."

An estimated 33 million people worldwide are infected with HIV. About 11
million of them also have tuberculosis, Barre-Sinoussi said. By suppressing
the immune system, HIV leaves people susceptible to other infections,
including TB.

In sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV infects more than 22 million people, TB
incidence has quadrupled in the last 15 years, Chaisson said.

Nonresistant TB is curable, but the majority of Africans are not getting
antibiotics, according to the World Health Organization. And a dangerous
form of the disease, multidrug- resistant TB, now accounts for 5% of all new
TB cases worldwide, and 15% to 22% of new cases in parts of the former
Soviet Union and China.

Even the drug-resistant strain is treatable with the right antibiotics. But
for a rarer and even more dangerous strain known as extensively
drug-resistant TB, half of those treated don't survive, Chaisson said.

International funding is used to provide treatment in poor countries as well
as for research on new antibiotics.

What concerns Barre-Sinoussi is that neither HIV nor TB was discussed at the
summit of the Group of 8 leading industrialized nations in Japan in July.
And that was before the economic situation worsened in recent weeks.
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