TB Is Top Killer of People With HIV/AIDS Positive People HIV/AIDS Patients

Citing tuberculosis as the number one killer worldwide of people with HIV/AIDS, a new study is calling upon health officials in South­east Asia to change the way they screen for the respiratory illness to increase the chances of early diagnosis.

Health professionals are now en­couraged to first screen for three classic TB symptoms: chron­ic cough, frequent night sweats and fever. The approach, of­ficials said, is designed to help tar­get TB testing to those who need it the most.

Dr Kevin Cain, a medical officer with the US Centers for Dis­ease Control and Prevention who help­ed lead the survey, said if a patient confirms that he has one or more of the three symptoms, then further medical testing is needed to determine if the disease is in fact present.

If he answers no to all three, the patient most likely does not have TB.

“No single symptom is sufficiently sensitive to do a TB screen­ing,” he said Monday while presenting his research findings in Phnom Penh. “Symptom screening for three [symptoms] is very good at ruling out TB.”

The study was funded by the US Agency for International De­velopment and surveyed more than 1,700 HIV-positive patients in Cambodia, Thailand and Viet­nam over the course of a year.

According to the World Health Organization, 7.8 percent of TB cases in Cambodia in 2007 were with HIV-positive individuals, dropping from 11.8 percent in 2003. Roughly 96,000 Cambo­dians suffer from TB, a treatable lung disease that is spread through the air.

Dr Cain said diagnosing TB in HIV-positive patients can be difficult to begin with because their immune systems are already weakened and their bodies may not react with the same symptoms as a healthy individual. An­other problem is that TB pro­gresses very quickly in HIV pa­t­ients, giving medical professionals little time to uncover it. If left untreated, the disease is often fatal.

“HIV-positive people die quickly if they have TB and do not get any treatment for it,” said Dr Mao Tan Eang, director of Cambodia’s National Center for Tuberculosis and Leprosy Control. “HIV people can live with their disease forever but TB must be treated within only six months. So the diagnosis is very important to reduce the number of deaths.”

Besides changing their methods of finding TB among HIV-positive patients, Cambodian health officials say they need to test more people to get a clear picture of the disease prevalence.

“We have to increase our diagnosis to 90 percent of people with HIV in the year that we find them,” said Dr Mean Chhi Vun, director of the National Center for HIV/ AIDS, Dermatology and STDs at the Ministry of Health.

 

Related Stories

Latest News