The incidence of tuberculosis (TB) among Tibetan refugees in India is 431 cases/100,000 persons, compared with 181 cases/100,000 persons overall in India in 2010. More than half of TB cases in these refugees occur among students, monks, and nuns in congregate settings. We sought to increase TB case detection rates for this population through active case finding and rapid molecular diagnostics. ...

BACKGROUND Changing epidemiology and diagnostic difficulties of paediatric tuberculosis (TB) are being increasingly reported. Our aim was to describe clinico-epidemiological profile and diagnostic procedures used for paediatric TB. METHODS A retrospective case-series analysis was carried out in a tertiary care teaching hospital of western Nepal. All pediatric TB (age 0-14 years) patients regi...

I n December 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) endorsed the use of a new DNA-based test for tuberculosis (TB), the Gene Xpert [1]. This test is expected to revolutionise the care of TB and, especially, multidrug-resistant (MDR)TB, by providing accurate diagnoses in less than 2 h [2]. As healthcare professionals begin to incorporate rapid TB testing into clinical practice, questions abou...

TB (Tuberculosis) of intrathoracic lymph nodes is the most common form of tuberculosis disease in childhood. In Bulgaria, about 67%-70% of all newly diagnosed children patients are with this diagnosis. The purpose of this study was to determine the diagnostic capabilities of the T-SPOT TB in this form of TB disease. In a period of one year, 50 children aged 0-12 years treated in our hospital wi...

BACKGROUND The urine lipoarabinomannan (LAM) strip-test (Determine®-TB) can rapidly rule-in TB in HIV-infected persons with advanced immunosuppression. However, given high rates of empiric treatment amongst hospitalised patients in high-burden settings (≈ 50%) it is unclear whether LAM can add any value to clinical decision making, or identify a subset of patients with unfavourable outcomes tha...

BACKGROUND As part of a formal evaluation of the Quantiferon-Gold in-tube assay (QFT-IT) for latent TB infection we compared its sensitivity to the tuberculin skin test (TST) in confirmed adult TB cases in Indonesia. Smear-positive TB disease was used as a proxy gold standard for latent TB infection. METHODS AND FINDINGS We compared the sensitivity of QFT-IT and TST in 98 sputum smear and che...

We conducted a contact investigation in a psychiatric hospital to evaluate the nosocomial transmission of tuberculosis (TB). Contacts included hospital healthcare workers (HCWs) and inpatients who had been exposed to an index case of pulmonary TB. Contacts were evaluated for Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection with standard screening methods as well as the QuantiFERONR-TB Gold (QFT-G) test. A ...

BACKGROUND Rapid and accurate diagnosis of tuberculosis (TB) is crucial to facilitate early treatment of infectious cases and thus to reduce its spread. To improve the diagnosis of TB, more rapid diagnostic techniques such as antibody detection methods including enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA)-based serological tests and immunochromatographic methods were developed. This study was des...

Objective To evaluate TB test usage and associated direct medical expenditures from 2013 private insurance claims data in the United States (US). Methods We extracted outpatient claims for TB-specific and nonspecific tests from the 2013 MarketScan® commercial database. We estimated average expenditures (adjusted for claim and patient characteristics) using semilog regression analyses and comp...

The objectives of this study were to evaluate the suitability of the TB-SA antibody test to diagnose tuberculosis in sputum smear negative (SS-) pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) patients and its applicability for monitoring treatment outcomes in these patients. This study was conducted in three counties/districts in Chongqing Municipality, Liaoning Province, China between June 2005 and June 2007. A ...