TY - JOUR T1 - Screening for tuberculosis by sputum culture among risk groups in a TB low- incidence country JF - European Respiratory Journal JO - Eur Respir J VL - 44 IS - Suppl 58 SP - 1696 AU - Sidse Graff Jensen AU - Nete Wrona Olsen AU - Niels Seersholm AU - Torgny Wilcke AU - Troels Lillebæk AU - Axel Kok-Jensen Y1 - 2014/09/01 UR - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/44/Suppl_58/1696.abstract N2 - Background: Tuberculosis (TB) incidence in Denmark is 7/100.000. However ongoing transmission of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis (MT) is still seen among risk groups i.e. homeless. Active case finding using mobile chest x-ray screening and contact tracing have not been sufficient to stop this transmission and mobile x-ray screening would not be available after 2011.Aim: To evaluate whether “mobile” screening by sputum among TB-risk groups is:1) feasible on a large scale.2) cost effective.And can:3) Identify TB cases at an early stage defined as positive by culture and negative by microscopy.Methods: A nurse with a long experience in handling TB patients visited 9 places (homeless shelters etc.) in Copenhagen. She collected one “good” sputum sample from each person. During a 12 month period we performed this screening 3 times and encouraged the participants to be re-examined on these occasions.Results: We collected 907 sputum samples from 665 persons. Cultures were positive for MT in 21 persons (3,2% of the participants). Two were positive by microscopy (smear) and one of these two samples was negative by culture. Genotyping showed that all TB cases found by sputum screening were clustered and belonged to 3 of the most common 24 loci MIRU VNTR genotypes identified in Denmark.Conclusion: “Mobile” screening by sputum among TB-risk groups is possible. We found a surprisingly high TB incidence among the participants. Of the culture positive TB cases found all but one were smear-negative, indicating that microscopy is not sufficient to identify TB-cases in this population and that the cases found were early and probably non-contagious cases. ER -