Closing the gap in surveillance of tuberculosis and HIV co-infection, and the need for clinician-public health alliances

We read with much interest the editorial by Van der Werf et al. [1] in the European Respiratory Journal (ERJ). The authors rightly advocate for the need to improve completeness, accuracy and timeliness of tuberculosis (TB)/HIV co-infection data in Europe, pledging for more cooperation between primary care physicians, medical specialists and social workers. We agree with them and others [2] that much can be gained from closer collaboration between TB and HIV control programmes, and would like to share our experience from the Netherlands. In addition, we would like to comment on the incompleteness of surveillance registers in our country, as raised by the authors.