1992

WHO listed no less than 10 countries in which TB was dramatically increasing; It was subsequently realized that the AIDS virus was the most important trigger for this new global threat. The very immune cells destroyed by the HIV virus are the cells that enable the body to fight TB, so the virus could trigger TB among the 1.7 billion people in developing nations (as of 1992) who, unbeknownst to them, harbored the TB germ in little healed cicatrices in the lungs. (F. Ryan, 395-398, 401, 417).