Millions of lives have been saved—and tuberculosis deaths among those living with HIV have declined dramatically in the decades since. But so many were lost between the mid-1980s, when activists first began shouting that the commingling of HIV and TB would lead to catastrophe, and the mid-2000s, when HIV treatment finally became widely (but not universally) available. Tens of millions of people died of tuberculosis in those years. In fact, between 1985 and 2005, roughly as many people died of tuberculosis as in World Wars I and II combined.
