M. tuberculosis Infection Attributable to Exposure in Social Networks of Tuberculosis Cases in an Urban African Community

Kiwanuka, Noah, Zalwango, Sarah, Kakaire, Robert, Castellanos Reynosa, Maria, Quach, Trang Ho Thu, and Whalen, Christopher C. (2024) M. tuberculosis Infection Attributable to Exposure in Social Networks of Tuberculosis Cases in an Urban African Community. Open Forum Infectious Diseases, 11 (5). ofae200.

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Abstract

Background: The persistence of tuberculosis today and its global disparity send a powerful message that effective tuberculosis control must respond to its regional epidemiology. Active case finding through contact investigation is a standard protocol used for tuberculosis control, but its effectiveness has not been established, especially in endemic areas.

Methods: To quantify the potential effectiveness of contact investigation in Kampala, Uganda, we used a cross-sectional design to evaluate the social networks of 123 tuberculosis index cases and 124 controls without tuberculosis.

Results: Tuberculous infection was present in 515 of 989 tuberculosis case contacts (52.1%) and 396 of 1026 control contacts (38.6%; adjusted prevalence ratio, 1.4; 95% CI, 1.3–1.6). The proportion of infected participants with known exposure within the social network of the tuberculosis case was 35%. The population-attributable fraction was 11.1% for any known exposure, with 7.3% attributable to household exposure and 3.4% attributable to extrahousehold exposure.

Conclusions: This low population-attributable fraction indicates that contact tracing in the social networks of index cases will have only a modest effect in reducing tuberculous infection in a community. New approaches to community-level active case finding are needed.

Item ID: 82872
Item Type: Article (Research - C1)
ISSN: 2328-8957
Keywords: latent tuberculosis infection, population-attributable fraction, tuberculosis, tuberculosis control
Copyright Information: © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Infectious Diseases Society of America. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Date Deposited: 27 May 2024 06:53
FoR Codes: 42 HEALTH SCIENCES > 4202 Epidemiology > 420207 Major global burdens of disease @ 100%
SEO Codes: 20 HEALTH > 2004 Public health (excl. specific population health) > 200404 Disease distribution and transmission (incl. surveillance and response) @ 100%
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