Thank you for your question. Your brother was diagnosed with two very serious infections and a very low CD4 count. He really should be on antiretroviral therapy. Your brother’s doctors maybe worried about drug interactions between the TB drugs and the kind of antiretrovirals available in Malawi.<\/p>\n
But people with HIV who have low CD4 counts and also need to take TB medication, should start on the TB drugs for at least two weeks to see how well they tolerate the drugs. If they can tolerate the drugs well, then they need to start on antiretroviral therapy as soon as possible. At least this is what the UK HIV guidelines suggest. Please do come back to us if you have any further questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My brother who lives in Malawi was diagnosed HIV positive in November 2007. His CD4 count was 80. He has TB and started taking three TB pills. He had a bad reaction with rash all over his body. The doctors stopped him taking the three tablets for three weeks. They resumed treatment with different pills. The doctors are not giving him ARVS and meanwhile he tells me he is getting weaker. What is the right time for my brother to start taking ARVS?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,29,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-topics","category-newly-diagnosed","category-opportunistic-infections","category-starting-treatment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}