As the 17th International AIDS Conference comes to an end in Mexico City, with calls for more efforts that need to be done in order to reduce the percentage of HIV infections and to pay more attention to prevention methods, a new report reveals that people living with HIV/AIDS are more exposed to tuberculosis.

The CDC urged for “new strategies such as expanded screening in health-care settings” to have early diagnosis of HIV and recommended that the HIV test should become a standard test during any ordinary doctor’s visit. But researchers from the Advocacy to Control TB Internationally (ACTION) coalition also recommended universal TB screening for all persons living with HIV/AIDS and emphasized the need to improve access to the 3 “I” s - Intensified case finding, Infection control, and Isoniazid preventive therapy.

The report shows that of the 33 million HIV-positive people worldwide, only 314,394 individuals had been tested for tuberculosis, Reuters notes. “Persons living with HIV/AIDS are 50 times more likely to develop tuberculosis, than those who are HIV negative,” the researchers cautioned, according to the same source. “Without treatment, approximately 90% of persons living with HIV/AIDS die within a few months of developing TB.”

Dr. Jim Yong Kim, chief of the division of social medicine and health inequalities at Harvard Medical School added that an integrated HIV/TB approach is needed. TB is the most important medical complication of infection with HIV and it is also the No.1 killer among HIV-positive people in Africa. About 700,000 tuberculosis cases develop among HIV-positive people yearly.

Participants concluded that therapy and prevention should go hand in hand. The goal of providing anti-retroviral therapy to HIV-infected people around the world and the search for a vaccine should be a global effort. Around 33 million people had the AIDS virus in 2007. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the epicenter of the global malady.