The Global Fund was set up to fight TB as well as malaria and Aids, and it provides two-thirds of all international financing for tuberculosis, yet the share of TB spend within the fund is disproportionately low.
Prisons constitute an epidemiological pump for tuberculosis transmission in most endemic countries, and thus require a fair share of high quality tuberculosis staff.
As a consequence, both national immigration policies and global health strategies for the control of tuberculosis share common interest in mobile populations moving from high-to-low prevalence regions.
Asian and African countries share the highest burden of tuberculosis, accounting for about 85% of the 8.6 million newly diagnosed TB cases reported globally in 2012 [ 2].
Africa continues to bear a disproportionate share of the global HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria burden.
Our findings of shared M. tuberculosis genotypes among users of hospitals and other health facilities, a community centre, and homeless shelters suggest that infection control measures may need further improvement, e.g. prompt identification, evaluation, diagnosis, and isolation of persons with potential TB-related symptoms.
This method shows that contact cases of tuberculosis often, but not always, shared the same strain of M. tuberculosis as the index case, despite high level of tuberculosis transmission in the community.
Where staff, facilities, or other resources were shared between tuberculosis and other care, the cost of tuberculosis care was estimated based on the proportion of the resource consumed by tuberculosis care.
DNA fingerprinting can be used to identify clusters of TB patients that share M. tuberculosis strains with identical patterns and to estimate when transmission occurred.
Since the publication of the second version of our spoligotypes database on Mycobacterium tuberculosis (1), the causative agent of tuberculosis (TB), the proportion of clustered isolates (shared types [STs]) increased from 84% (2,779/3,319) to 90% (11,708/13,008).
