OBJECTIVES: To assess whether public health nurses adhered to Dutch guidelines for tuberculosis contact investigations and to explore which factors influenced the process of identifying contacts, prioritizing contacts for testing and scaling up a …
BACKGROUND: Non-adherence to tuberculosis (TB) treatment is the leading contributor to the selection of drug-resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and subsequent treatment failure. Tanzania introduced a TB Patient Centred Treatment (PCT) …
BACKGROUND: In Bangladesh DOTS has been provided free of charge since 1993, yet information on access to TB services by different population group is not well documented. The objective of this study was to assess and compare the socio economic …
BACKGROUND: Tuberculosis (TB) presents a serious problem in Mozambique. HIV prevalence among TB patients is estimated at 47%. A delay in having their first CD4+ cell count could lead to a missed opportunity for ART initiation due to a CD4+ cell …
SETTING: An increasing proportion of tuberculosis (TB) patients in low-incidence countries are immigrants. It is unclear whether contact investigations among immigrant patients are adequate. OBJECTIVE: To determine whether ethnicity of pulmonary TB …
BACKGROUND:: Tuberculosis-HIV (TB-HIV) coinfection remains an important cause of mortality in antiretroviral therapy (ART) programs. In a cohort of TB-HIV-coinfected patients starting ART, we examined the incidence and predictors of early mortality. …
SETTING A national tuberculosis (TB) drug resistance survey in Tanzania. OBJECTIVE To compare the performance of the Genotype® MTBDRplus line-probe assay (LPA) on smear-positive sputum specimens with conventional culture and isoniazid (INH) plus …
SETTING A passive case-finding strategy as present in the DOTS strategy presupposes a patient's willingness to seek care. This requires awareness of tuberculosis (TB) symptoms and the diagnostic process, and positive attitudes towards access and …
Addressing social determinants in the field of tuberculosis (TB) has received great attention in the past years, mainly due to the fact that worldwide TB incidence has not declined as much as expected, despite highly curative control strategies. One …