Mandela Sounds Alarm on TB ‘Death Sentence’ in AIDS War

The global war on AIDS could be lost if the world ignores tuberculosis, often a “death sentence” for people infected with HIV, former South African president Nelson Mandela said Thursday.

The global war on AIDS could be lost if the world ignores tuberculosis, often a “death sentence” for people infected with HIV, former South African president Nelson Mandela said Thursday.”The world has made defeating AIDS its top priority. This is a blessing, but TB remains ignored,” the frail Nobel laureate and AIDS campaigner told reporters at a global conference in Bangkok.About 14 million people are infected with HIV and TB, with about 70 percent living in sub-Saharan Africa, the region hardest hit by HIV/AIDS which has killed 20 million people worldwide.HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, destroys the immune system and makes patients more vulnerable to diseases such as TB, an infectious respiratory illness which accounts for up to one third of all HIV/AIDS deaths worldwide.”We cannot win the battle against AIDS if we do not also fight TB. TB is too often a death sentence for people with AIDS. It does not have to be this way,” Mandela said.Mandela, who was jailed for 27 years for fighting apartheid before leading South Africa to democracy in 1994, described his own battle against TB in prison.”I went to my friends in prison, Walter Sisulu and others, and told them I was found to have TB. There were long faces drawn,” said Mandela.He urged the world to intensify the fight against TB, which kills about two million people each year.Mandela, a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy in recent years, is to speak Friday at the closing of a conference where Washington has come under fire for its AIDS policies and for rejecting U.N. calls to give more money to a global AIDS fund.RESEARCH BOOST Research into the dual tuberculosis and AIDS epidemic got a boost Thursday with a $45 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.The philanthropic organization set up by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said the money would fund studies into strategies to control TB in areas with high HIV infection rates.”We cannot successfully fight HIV/AIDS without also fighting TB, which has emerged as the leading killer of HIV-positive people,” Dr Helene Gayle, a director at the foundation, said in a statement released at the 15th International AIDS conference.The research will be conducted by the Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS-TB Epidemic (CREATE), which is led by scientists at the Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis Research.The Seattle-based foundation said the money would pay for three large-scale community studies in Africa and South America over seven years.Earlier this year, the Gates Foundation donated $82.9 billion for research into a vaccine to prevent tuberculosis, which kills an estimated two million people every year.Mandela, who turns 86 next week, bowed out of public life in June, but he remains a tireless campaigner against the AIDS scourge infecting one in nine people in South Africa, the hardest-hit nation in the world.He has raised millions of dollars for his Nelson Mandela Foundation to battle the killer disease and took center stage with Bono, The Corrs and Beyonce Knowles at a pop concert he organized in Cape Town last November to raise funds. (Source: Reuters, July 2004)