Time to Act to Save A Million Lives by 2015: Prevent and Treat Tuberculosis Among People Living with HIV

The Stop TB (Tuberculosis) Partnership of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) have produced an advocacy brochure entitled "Time to Act to Save A Million Lives by 2015: Prevent and Treat Tuberculosis Among People Living with HIV." The brochure is designed to explain the relationship between HIV and TB and to advocate steps that should be taken by governments and health care providers to reduce TB-related deaths by one million by the year 2015. To save one million lives, the organisations advocate for the following:

• Make health services more widely available.
• Improve the quality of TB care.
• Reach out to test for HIV and screen for TB.
• Prevent TB (using a daily dose of isonizaid).
• Provide ART (antiretroviral therapy) sooner.

The brochure contains visuals combined with statistics that are designed to be helpful in representing how many lives can be saved and for what cost. It particularly emphasises a focus on pregnant women and children, who are especially vulnerable to TB and HIV. Questions and answers of experts in the field and statements from leaders, such as Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton, who endorse the campaign to fight TB alongside HIV/AIDS, can be used as advocacy tools to show widespread support for increased programming in these areas. The final page of the brochure has a graph showing the positive results of scaled-up HIV testing among people with TB in ten countries to prove that "quick wins are feasible."