Test and Treat: A New Standard for Smear-Positive Tuberculosis

Optimizing sputum smear microscopy, the principal method of tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis in high-burden settings around the world, is a critical priority for global TB control. To improve rates of testing, completion, and reporting, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently endorsed a policy of same-day diagnosis of TB by microscopy. Unfortunately, the implementation of this policy has emphasized same-day sputum collection alone, with patients required to return on a subsequent day to collect results. We use a simple decision analysis to demonstrate that the timing of results reporting has a greater impact on treatment initiation for smear-positive TB cases than the timing of specimen collection. Same-day diagnosis of smear-positive TB, including sputum collection and reporting of smear results, should be the new global standard.

Keywords

Tuberculosis, Modeling, Decision analysis, Smear microscopy, Same-day diagnosis, Same-day treatment

Citation

Davis, J. L., Dowdy, D. W., Den Boon, S., Walter, N. D., Katamba, A., & Cattamanchi, A. (2012). Test and treat: a new standard for smear-positive tuberculosis. Journal of acquired immune deficiency syndromes (1999), 61(1), e6. doi:10.1097/QAI.0b013e3182614bc5

URI

https://nru.uncst.go.ug/handle/123456789/7078

Collections

Medical and Health Sciences

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