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. 2005 Apr 14;6(1):35.
doi: 10.1186/1465-9921-6-35.

Occupational risk of tuberculosis transmission in a low incidence area

Roland Diel  1 , Andreas Seidler, Albert Nienhaus, Sabine Rüsch-Gerdes, Stefan Niemann
Affiliations

Occupational risk of tuberculosis transmission in a low incidence area

Roland Diel et al. Respir Res. .

Abstract

Background: To investigate the occupational risk of tuberculosis (TB) infection in a low-incidence setting, data from a prospective study of patients with culture-confirmed TB conducted in Hamburg, Germany, from 1997 to 2002 were evaluated.

Methods: M. tuberculosis isolates were genotyped by IS6110 RFLP analysis. Results of contact tracing and additional patient interviews were used for further epidemiological analyses.

Results: Out of 848 cases included in the cluster analysis, 286 (33.7%) were classified into 76 clusters comprising 2 to 39 patients. In total, two patients in the non-cluster and eight patients in the cluster group were health-care workers. Logistic regression analysis confirmed work in the health-care sector as the strongest predictor for clustering (OR 17.9). However, only two of the eight transmission links among the eight clusters involving health-care workers had been detected previously. Overall, conventional contact tracing performed before genotyping had identified only 26 (25.2%) of the 103 contact persons with the disease among the clustered cases whose transmission links were epidemiologically verified.

Conclusion: Recent transmission was found to be strongly associated with health-care work in a setting with low incidence of TB. Conventional contact tracing alone was shown to be insufficient to discover recent transmission chains. The data presented also indicate the need for establishing improved TB control strategies in health-care settings.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Distribution of cases discovered by contact tracing and alternative sources
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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