LINKAGE BETWEEN TB AND HIV/AIDS
HIV/AIDS lowers body resistance to TB. This is due to weakened cellular immune response.
Thus, reactivation of TB is more common in HIV infected persons compared to non HIV infected persons.
As a result, TB is one of the major and most common opportunistic infections in people living with HIV/AIDS.
Furthermore, the two diseases tend to coexist. In Uganda, about 50% of TB patients are also with HIV infection.
Resulting from this co-infection, the numbers of TB cases in Uganda have risen many fold since the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Uganda (Figure below).
This has led to a heavy burden of TB with serious financial and other resource implications. These implications are even more grave given the heavy burden of HIV/AIDS per se.