16 May 2024 | Geneva The World Health Organization (WHO) has released the consolidated guidelines on HIV-associated TB (TB/HIV) that provides a single comprehensive source for the latest evidence-informed TB/HIV recommendations. These guidelines are part of WHO’s Consolidated guidelines on TB and comorbidities. To facilitate implementation of these guidelines, WHO has also published operational guidance on TB/HIV as part of the Operational handbook on TB and comorbidities, that also includes costed TB screening and diagnostic algorithms, models of integrated care and enablers for scaling up people-centred TB/HIV services. Adoption of the full package of WHO TB/HIV recommendations is expected to save more lives and further reduce the burden of HIV-associated TB.
WHO recommended interventions, including the combination of TB treatment and antiretroviral treatment are estimated to have averted 9.2 million TB deaths among people living with HIV between 2005 and 2022. This progress follows the roll out of WHO’s Interim policy on collaborative TB/HIV activities over a decade ago in response to demand from countries for immediate guidance on actions to decrease the dual burden of TB and HIV. In 2022, WHO also published the Framework for collaborative action on TB and comorbidities, to support countries establish and strengthen collaboration across health programmes and across sectors for the introduction and scale-up of collaborative action on TB and comorbidities.
In recent years there have been remarkable developments in screening, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of HIV-associated TB. These developments have informed updated recommendations in the related modules on TB screening, prevention, diagnosis and treatment in the WHO consolidated guidelines on tuberculosis on the WHO TB Knowledge Sharing Platform. There have also been updated recommendations within the Consolidated guidelines on HIV prevention, testing, treatment, service delivery and monitoring.
