No one should die from tuberculosis. It can be cured. Yet throughout Africa, TB is the leading killer of people living with HIV.

In the past 10 years, the global community has made tremendous progress in scaling up treatment programmes for those living with HIV in communities and towns once regarded as too remote to support distribution of antiretroviral drugs.

Yet today that progress is being threatened. An old enemy – tuberculosis – has re-emerged with a vengeance that could reverse a decade of advances in the fight against HIV/Aids.

Across the globe, the deadly combination of HIV and TB – long thought of in Europe as a disease of the past – is fuelling a TB resurgence globally. There are 14 million people co-infected with TB-HIV in the world. In my own country, Kenya, TB is by far the greatest killer of people infected with HIV. Fifty percent of TB patients there are HIV positive.

Because of their compromised immune systems, people like me, living with HIV, are more likely to get TB, more susceptible to active infection and more likely to die unless we receive proper treatment. I spent seven months in a Kenyan hospital battling tuberculosis as it spread from my chest to my lymph nodes to my knees. Only with invasive surgery, antiretroviral therapy and pure chance did I become one of the lucky ones.

This week in New York, the UN general assembly's special session on HIV/Aids is bringing together world leaders and civil society to strengthen action on HIV/Aids.

But without a joint strategy to help the millions of people worldwide living with both TB and HIV receive the treatment and care they need, this cannot succeed.

Every TB patient needs to be screened for HIV, every person living with Aids needs to be tested for TB and there needs to be joint planning between national TB and HIV programmes.

And a strategy will do nothing to help the sick and the dying without strong commitments from rich governments to fund new approaches to TB/HIV co-infection. Furthermore it will not help those at risk unless we invest in new tools for TB prevention.

TB never really disappeared - it was just confined to the poor, the sick, the ignored. But over the last 15 years, the number of new TB cases has more than doubled in countries with the highest rates of HIV infection. The World Health Organisation estimates that globally, one-third of people living with HIV are also infected with TB.

In Kenya, activists and politicians have called for a declaration of a national disaster to confront the twin epidemics. In many African countries, the emergence of multi-drug resistant TB and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) has brought a new urgency to treatment, as doctors grapple to save lives without adequate solutions. Reports of an XDR-TB case in Glasgow earlier this year raised the alarm in the United Kingdom – a wake-up call for all of us to think about TB.
The situation will continue to deteriorate unless we have new tools to fight TB. Though now widely available, the drugs we have were invented 40 years ago, must be taken daily for at least six months and, if compliance is not perfect, can continue to breed drug resistance.

The one existing TB vaccine was invented 85 years ago and offers only some protection against a small percentage of severe childhood cases. The frustrating truth is that we cannot accurately diagnose TB. The most commonly used TB diagnostic tool detects only half of new cases and cannot identify drug-resistant disease strains. In HIV-positive patients, it is even less accurate, detecting only 20% of TB infections.

We must maintain efforts to prevent and treat HIV. But we must also transform TB prevention, diagnostics and treatment with new TB vaccines, new TB tests and new TB medicines. Researchers around the world are committed to this task.

Their success will require sustained support from donor governments. The UK has long been a leader in responding to the global TB epidemic. But much more is needed.

For too long TB has been ignored, simply because it targets the weak – whether those with HIV or the old, young or poor. Through vision, action, new technologies and increased funding, we must prove once and for all that what is good for the world's most vulnerable citizens is, in fact, good for us all.