Malawi: Authorities allay fears

Tuberculosis patients who are also HIV positive and require being booked for Anti Retroviral drugs should can do that, Amon Nkhata, ART officer responsible for sexually transmitted infections has said. He said it is safe to combine the two treatments and added that earlier deaths reported were rumour.

“There is no risk in taking together TB drugs and ARVs however I can say that with HIV many people that are diagnosed with TB also happen to be HIV positive and this usually happens when they have a very low CD4 count,” he said.

He however said while TB drugs can be taken with ARV’s a component of ARVs, Neverapine and a component of the TB cocktail rifbacin can not be taken together as they do not react very well.

“Neverapine in ARVs and Rifbacin in TB drugs do not react well together and there is a special regimen that is and administered to patient in such a situation,” he said.

A recent research conducted by the Comprehensive International Programme for Research on AIDS (CAPRISA) in South Africa also indicates that combining ARV therapy with TB treatment halves the mortality rate among patients infected with HIV and TB.

The CAPRISA research compared mortality rates in three groups of co-infected patients who started treatment at different stages of their TB therapy.

One group started taking treatment in the first two months of TB treatment; a second group started taking them the first two months of TB treatment and the third group did not begin ARV treatment until they had completed their six to eight month TB medication.

The research discovered that patients in the third group had a 55 percent death rate higher than in the other two groups that were on integrated ARV and TB treatment.

The WHO estimates that 30 percent of infected patients in Sub-Saharan Africa die before finishing their TB treatment. HIV specialists in South Africa have since urged the health department to revise treatment guidelines in response to the CAPRISA report.