We believe this Bleomycin led to better screening, more diagnosis, better treatment and ultimately better survival of patients with TB at the IDI. We believe that the majority of these additional

TB cases were attributable to “unmasking” of reactivated TB because of restoration of TB antigen-specific functional immune responses [29-31]. The improved TB care at the IDI could partly explain the lower mortality seen in later years, independent of a higher baseline CD4 cell count. It also reflects the fact that TB occurs at higher CD4 cell counts and remains very common among ART initiators [32]. Our study has several limitations. The analysis was based on routinely collected data with known issues of missing data and outcome ascertainment. We believe that 20–60% of patients lost to follow-up would have died in addition to the numbers we present here [18, 33]. The lack of funds to perform adequate patient tracing and the absence of a Ugandan national death registry preclude the use of a weighted analysis, adding patients lost to follow-up but known to be dead, as previously used by Boulle et al. [21], or the use of a recently published nomogram [34]. This analysis therefore represents a conservative

estimate of mortality in our clinic. Efforts to initiate ART at higher baseline CD4 cell counts in our large HIV urban clinic in Kampala, Uganda, have been effective, and are associated with decreased mortality. A better standard of care and the setting up of a specialized integrated TB/HIV clinic, leading to OSI-906 mouse improved TB case finding, might have led to additional reductions in mortality

in TB/HIV-coinfected individuals, supporting integration of care. Further efforts to initiate ART earlier should be prioritized even in a setting of capped or reduced funding for ART programmes. We wish to thank the ADAMTS5 IDI data management and validation team for their efforts in collecting and improving the quality of our data. Funding: This work was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research–WOTRO Science for Global Development: NACCAP (grant number W 07.05.20100) and the European Union (grant number SANTE/2006/105-316) as part of the Infectious Diseases Network for Treatment and Research in Africa (INTERACT) programme. “
“The implications of HIV infection are vast. Management of clinical symptomatology, though, cannot be overshadowed by focus on disease management. These must be managed in concert. Diarrhoea, a common complaint of HIV-infected people, can be difficult to manage, and complicated further by polypharmacy. This review will critically appraise literature related to the management of diarrhoea with probiotics in HIV-infected people. PubMed, CINAHL, and The Cochrane Library were searched for randomized controlled trials investigating the use of probiotics in HIV-infected people, which included diarrhoeal symptoms as a primary or secondary endpoint.