Home »

United States to test "high risk" immigrants to eliminate tuberculosis (TB)

Houston, Jan 07: In order to successfully eliminate the disease tuberculosis (TB) in United States, all foreign born residents from "high incidence countries", including Indians, will soon be reclassified as "high risk", regardless of the amount of time they have lived here.

For this they all will be tested for latent TB infections.

As of now, recommendations call for those foreign-born residents who have been in the United States for five years or less be targeted for tuberculin skin testing and treatment of latent TB infection.

Kevin P Cain, MD, of the division of tuberculosis elimination at the centres for disease control and prevention in Atlanta, and seven associates collected data on all 2004 TB cases listed in the US National TB Surveillance Database.

The investigators' aim was to understand why the number of annual cases of TB reported in US-born persons declined by 93 percent from 1993 to 2004, while foreign-born cases increased by five-percent.

"For example, in 2004, a total of 14,517 cases of tuberculosis was reported," said Kevin Cain. "Of these cases, 3,444 or 24 percent were foreign-born persons who had entered the United States more than five years previously."

The goal of tuberculosis control efforts in the United States is eliminating the disease -- or reducing the prevalence of the disease to less than one case reported per million in a given population. If achieved, the number of tuberculosis cases diagnosed in 2004 would have been less than 3 00.

"Until we address the burden of latent TB infection in the foreign-born group, achieving TB elimination will not be possible," said Cain.

The following countries of origin of US immigrant residents had the largest number of TB cases in 2004: Mexico (1,976), Philippines (829), Vietnam (619), India (557), China (352), Haiti (248), South Korea (219), Guatemala (190), Ethiopia (169) and Peru (159).