Tuberculosis and co-existing common mental and substance-use disorders: a case for including mental healthcare and substance-use prevention as part of the tuberculosis treatment package in high-burden provinces

HSRC Policy Brief, MarchSouth Africa has 0.7% of the world's population and 28% of the world's population of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and tuberculosis (TB) co-infected individuals. It has been estimated that approximately 60% of people with TB are co-infected with HIV (WHO 2012). Co-infected individuals have almost double the chances of getting multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extreme-drug resistant TB (XDR-TB). These individuals also have a high mortality rate due to co-infection with HIV (Department of Health, RSA 2007).