By Monicah Otieno, PhD:

In the west of Kenya, near the shores of Lake Victoria, where I come from, a tuberculosis outbreak is no different from one that takes place anywhere else in the world. A few dozen people get sick, health workers attempt to locate and test everyone with a bad cough and other symptoms. A concerted effort is made to make sure that patients take their medications for the entire duration of treatment, at least six months, to help stem the creation of drug-resistant infections.

The problem is that Western Kenya has a high burden of HIV infections, which makes the communities more vulnerable to TB infections. People living with HIV are more than 14 times more likely to fall ill with TB disease than people without HIV.

Other locations — like the communities on the Uganda shores of Lake Victoria, Copperbelt Province in Zambia, Eastern Cape Province in South Africa, or Enugu State in Nigeria — have this vulnerability. Of the 30 countries that the World Health Organization identified as having a high burden of TB and HIV co-infections, 22 are located in sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa, India, Nigeria, Mozambique, and Kenya tragically have the most co-infections globally.

HIV is not like TB. While TB treatment takes six long months, this is a curable disease. HIV, on the other hand, cannot be cured. It can, however, be kept in check through medicine that suppresses the infection. The virus attacks the immune system, allowing other diseases like TB, kept in check by the immune system, to strengthen. In fact, TB is the leading cause of death for people living with HIV infections.

This is where partnerships with foreign donors can make a difference, with resources for programs that have located people living with HIV and then provided them with proper medicines. These programs help keep infections in check, preventing HIV from spreading and preventing other infections like TB from becoming more widespread. Similar programs help locate people with TB and provide them with medicines throughout the six months of treatment.

The trend right now is to disrupt these partnerships and cut foreign aid, unraveling the safety net that addresses HIV and TB. This places regions like Western Kenya at extreme risk from two contagious diseases that do not respect national borders. If they are not contained in even one location, we run the risk of the contagion spreading.

There are so many ways that this situation can be improved, in sub-Saharan Africa and throughout the Global South. We need n