BACKGROUND Measuring a country's health performance has focused mostly on estimating levels of mortality. An alternative is to measure rates of decline in mortality, which are more sensitive to changes in health policy than are mortality levels. Historical rates of decline in mortality can also help test the feasibility of future health goals (eg, post-2015). We aimed to assess the annual rates...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the impact that the 2009 changes in tuberculosis treatment in Brazil had on the rates of cure, tuberculosis recurrence, mortality, treatment abandonment, and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). METHODS An ordinary least squares regression model was used in order to perform an interrupted time series analysis of secondary data collected from the Brazilian Tuberculos...

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis is a leading cause of death worldwide, yet the determinants of death are not well understood. We sought to determine risk factors for mortality during treatment of drug-susceptible pulmonary tuberculosis under program settings. METHODS Retrospective chart review of patients with drug-susceptible tuberculosis reported to the San Francisco Tuberculosis Control Program fr...

OBJECTIVE Cause-specific death rates are rarely available to guide health interventions for adults in South Asia. We report mortality patterns among Karachi's urban poor. METHODS We conducted verbal autopsies for adult deaths under active surveillance during 1990-1993 in five urban slums of Karachi. Two physicians assigned underlying cause of death by consensus. Analysis included cause- and c...

Death among tuberculosis patients is one of the major reasons for non-attainment of 85% treatment success target set by World Health Organization. In this short paper, we evaluated whether the overall mortality rate in pulmonary tuberculosis is being affected by other comorbid conditions. All new smear positive pulmonary tuberculosis patients (N =336), who started their treatment at the chest c...

OBJECTIVES Reliable estimates of the joint burden of HIV and tuberculosis epidemics are crucial to planning strategic global and national tuberculosis responses. Prior to the Global Tuberculosis Report 2013, the Global Tuberculosis Programme (GTB) released estimates for tuberculosis-HIV incidence at the global level only. Neither GTB nor United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) published c...