Extract
In the consolidated guidelines for tuberculosis (TB) prevention and systematic screening for TB disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends countries with a low TB incidence to consider systematic screening for TB disease as well as testing for TB infection (TBI) and preventive TB treatment (TPT) for migrants from high TB burden countries [1, 2]. Many low TB burden countries, including the Netherlands, perform TB screening among those migrants [3]. In the Netherlands, migrants are mandatorily screened for TB by chest radiography (CXR) within 3 months after entry; migrants from countries with an estimated WHO TB incidence of >200 per 100 000 are also offered voluntary biannual follow-up screening for 2 years.
Abstract
TB symptom and TB infection screening has potential to replace current chest radiography screening among high TB risk migrants in low burden countries. Screening programmes should be evaluated through epidemiological data and assessing progression rates. https://bit.ly/362r25u
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all staff members from the department of tuberculosis control of the Public Health Services for their dedicated work in TB control and care.
Footnotes
Data sharing: The data supporting the results of this study are obtained from multiple sources. We received permission from these sources to use the data for this study purpose, including publishing results of the study. However, no permission was sought to publish an anonymous dataset. Therefore, anonymous data supporting the study results can be made available only upon request, upon approval by the Dutch National Tuberculosis Registration Committee.
Author contributions: In collaboration with the other authors, C. Joren and I. Spruijt wrote the study's plan of analysis. C. Joren and H. Schimmel performed data management. C. Joren and I. Spruijt conducted statistical analysis. F. Procee, Y. Alam and I. Spruijt searched and extracted data from the literature. I. Spruijt and C. Erkens wrote the manuscript. All authors read, commented on and approved the final manuscript.
Conflict of interest: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Support statement: This work was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw, grant number 50–53000-98-128, https://www.zonmw.nl/en/). The funder ZonMw had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Funding information for this article has been deposited with the Crossref Funder Registry.
- Received November 26, 2021.
- Accepted February 3, 2022.
- Copyright ©The authors 2022. For reproduction rights and permissions contact permissions{at}ersnet.org
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