Opinion: If J&J really wants to support nurses, it should make the TB drug bedaquiline affordable

As nurses who worked in 5B, the first U.S. hospital ward dedicated HIV/AIDS, which opened in San Francisco General Hospital in 1983, we have been directly affected in profound ways by the disease and its opportunistic infections.

One of us is HIV-positive, infected from exposure to blood from a patient’s intravenous line. Two of us were infected with tuberculosis from breathing the air exhaled by our patients who were sick from both HIV and tuberculosis. Tuberculosis and HIV infection nearly killed one of our spouses. For years we watched as our patients succumbed to a host of rare diseases and