TNF and HIV infectious disease: To determine whether curcumin protected the endocervix in a similar manner to endometrium, since this site has been directly implicated in simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) acquisition in non-human primate models and HIV infection in humans [36, 37], we treated primary human endocervical monolayers with curcumin and exposed them to HIV-1 for 24-hours and measured TNF-α production, TER and ZO-1 expression.