Synergistic Pandemics: Confronting the Global HIV and Tuberculosis Epidemics

This supplement was envisioned to sum-marize the critical issues related to the 2 most deadly infectious diseases worldwide: human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in-fection and AIDS and tuberculosis (TB). Together, these infections—1 viral and 1 bacterial, 1 recently emergent and 1 an-cient—kill almost 4 million persons every year, most of whom live in developing nations. In tandem, HIV infection and TB create a deadly synergy. TB is the leading cause of death among persons with HIV infection, and areas with a high prevalence of HIV infection have had dramatic in-creases in the incidence of TB disease. The US government has played a lead-ership role in addressing the HIV and TB pandemics, most recently through the en-actment of the Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership