What we and others demonstrate is that chronic HIV infection of latent TB subjects has the potential to functionally alter the Mtb-specific CD4+ T-cell response by reducing circulating frequencies of Mtb-specific Th1, Th17 polyfunctional cells and inducing expression of activation and exhaustion markers on these cells (Ahmed et al., 2018; Amelio et al., 2019; Rakshit et al., 2017, 2019). Here, CD4 is linked to HIV infectious disease.