Drug use spreads AIDS through dirty needles, and if this population gets TB, they usually do not have the self-control and sense of responsibility to take care of it. It is too expensive to keep each one of them in an isolated room and locked in. That’s how the bacteria become resistant, and then they spread in their resistant form from addict to addict.
Another link between AIDS and TB is that if you use the most common test for TB, you get a lot of false negatives, because the test involves an immune response and AIDS patients have an immune deficiency.
One more factor that makes an epidemic dangerous: TB can go dormant for many years, waiting in its little polysaccharide coating until the person’s immunity is low—from age, cancer treatment, or AIDS. Thus it can be an undetected pool in a community.
I was exposed to TB as a very young child in 1937.
I still test positive when given the tine test——78 years later.
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