TB prevalence, illness and deaths are very much more common in the low- and middle-income countries than high-income countries. However the higher rate of TB in low- and middle-income settings, especially in people with HIV, has meant that large TB studies have tended to be conducted there, and in some ways we know less about TB in high-income settings, especially in people with HIV.

Eastern Europe continues to have one of the worst HIV epidemics in the world outside sub-Saharan Africa, with the worst linkage to care of any region in the world, last week's meeting on Standard of Care for HIV and Coinfections in Europe heard.

One of the biggest news stories at the AIDS Vaccine 2013 conference was the groundbreaking experiment in which half of a group of monkeys given a candidate monkey-HIV vaccine appeared to lose all trace of viral infection. This vaccine used genes from simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), the monkey equivalent of HIV, contained in the shell of cytomegalovirus (CMV) – a ubiquitous virus from the herpes virus family.