WHY WE CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSE THE WAR AGAINST HIV/AIDS

“TB is a time bomb, and the clock ticking is HIV/AIDS”

Over the past 20 years, efforts to control tuberculosis in Kenya had been showing remarkable success. This trend, however, faces a great challenge from the spread of HIV/AIDS in the country. The number of TB cases has been rising alarmingly because of the prevalence of TB among people with HIV/AIDS. 

Information from the Ministry of Health shows that many, perhaps half, of all adult Kenyans carry a latent TB infection, which is suppressed by a healthy immune system. When HIV weakens the immune system, it can no longer control the TB infection and overt TB can develop. 

Statistics show that in the absence of HIV, the number of new TB infections would be limited to about 0.2% of the population. This means 40,000 to 60,000 new TB cases each year. 

With HIV/AIDS, the projection among people with both HIV and latent TB infections will be 8% each year, reflecting an additional 120,000 number of TB cases by the year 2005. This would be an accurate projection except for one factor: The contagious nature of TB. 

While HIV/AIDS is effectively preventable through behaviour change and protective measures, a person with TB is likely to unwittingly infect several others, whether they have HIV or not. A recent study in Nairobi’s Kenyatta National Hospital shows that the number of TB cases among all people admitted in the hospital doubled from 8% to 16% over the eight-year period between 1989 and 1997. Due to this prevalence of TB, the proportion in HIV-infected patients with active TB infection rose from 18% to 27% over the same period. 

While the cost of controlling HIV/AIDS per person in the population may be high, this is made even more so by the fact that TB will more often than not also be an issue to content with if HIV/AIDS is not immediately contained. With this, it becomes just a matter of time before every single Kenyan is exposed to TB, for the reason that whereas we can effectively prevent HIV infection, TB is highly infectious through casual contact. 

To complicate the issue further, drug-resistant strains of TB are appearing, making the disease much more difficult and expensive to treat. Thus we are forced to think of a pandemic with the medical complications of HIV/AIDS, enhanced by the contagious nature of TB. This is a problem the world as a whole is not prepared to deal with! 

TB is a time bomb waiting to explode, and combined with the threat of HIV/AIDS, we just cannot afford to let this lethal combination come to being. Yet there is one step to neutralizing this: Control HIV/AIDS before the clock ticks too late.  That is why the Government, KAWI and other organizations must win the war against HIV/AIDS, and win it before an unimaginable disaster strikes.