RESEARCH ARTICLE
Benchmarking to Assess Potential Under-Diagnosis of Smear-Negative and Extrapulmonary Tuberculosis. A Case Study from Mozambique
Miranda Brouwer1, Paula Samo Gudo2, Chalice Mage Simbe3, Paula Perdigao4, Frank van Leth5, 6
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2013Volume: 7
First Page: 1
Last Page: 5
Publisher Id: TOIDJ-7-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874279301307010001
Article History:
Received Date: 13/11/2012Revision Received Date: 9/1/2013
Acceptance Date: 9/1/2013
Electronic publication date: 08/2/2013
Collection year: 2013
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
No tool exists to identify potential under-diagnosis of smear-negative and extrapulmonary TB. In an ecological study, we used a simple tool plotting percentages of smear-positive pulmonary TB amongst newly diagnosed TB in African region countries and provinces in Mozambique against the country's and provinces’ HIV prevalence. We visually inspected the plots to determine potential under-diagnosis of smear-negative and extrapulmonary TB in three facilities in Manica Province, Mozambique.
In these facilities, we found 67% smear-positivity among new TB cases in an area with HIV prevalence of more than 10%. All African region countries with an HIV prevalence of more than 10% had a smear-positivity lower than 50%. Most Mozambican provinces with a high HIV prevalence have smear-positivity rate of below 51%. Our findings show that benchmarking can be used to assist in identifying potential under-diagnosis of smear-negative and extrapulmonary TB. The findings also suggest that potentially under-diagnosis of these forms of TB exists in the study population.
