“We must focus upon individual human beings rather than on individual diseases of TB and HIV. A person centric approach is bound to work together than a disease centric approach,” said Mark Dybul, Executive Director, Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria at a high level WHO consultation, held in conjunction with 20th International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2014), to discuss policies to catalyze the response for elimination of TB deaths among people living with HIV (PLHIV).

Well almost everything. Tuberculosis (TB) remains the most common AIDS-defining illness and the leading cause of death in people living with HIV (PLHIV) with 1 in 5 HIV-associated deaths in 2012 attributed to TB. At least one third of the 35.3 million living PLHIV worldwide are infected with latent TB. An estimated 1.1 million (13%) of the 8.6 million people who developed TB in 2012 were HIV-positive too.

It is estimated there are more than 5 million people sick with multi drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) in the world today, which afflicts approximately 440,000 people each year, including children. Likewise, 35.3 million people are living with HIV out of which 3.3 million are children. Most of these children acquire the virus from their HIV-infected mothers during pregnancy, birth or breastfeeding, while poverty, weak immune systems, malnourishment, HIV, and maternal TB make children more vulnerable to getting TB from infected adults. 74, 000 children succumb to TB every year while AIDS related paediatric deaths are 230,000.

It was a indeed a humbling experience for me to meet Ajay, a middle aged graduate from Muzzafarnagar, UP. Ajay was one of the rare cases of extensively drug resistant TB (XDR-TB) who had tested negative, but was still under treatment, and recovering in the MDR-TB Ward of Rajan Babu Institute of Pulmonary Medicine and Tuberculosis (RBIPMT), New Delhi, when I spoke to him (or rather he insisted that he speak to me) in February, 2013.  He was very keen to share his agonizing experiences with the rest of the world so that others would not suffer the same fate as his due to ignorance about diagnosis and treatment of TB.

Anirban Mukherjee is from Kolkata. An only child, he is 32 years old and educated till Class 10. No one else, except him, in his family has ever had TB. He has never smoked nor ever eaten gutkha/paan masala, but used to take alcohol occasionally in the past.