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Editorial
Post-pandemic tuberculosis incidence: potential success of active case finding?
  1. Catherine M Stein
  1. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Catherine M Stein, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA; catherine.stein{at}case.edu

https://doi.org/10.1136/thorax-2023-221224

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    Until 2020, tuberculosis (TB) was annually the number one infectious killer disease globally. When the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, TB took the number two seat in this said ranking, but a very close second.1 TB epidemiologists around the world became very concerned about what might happen with global TB burden in the wake of the pandemic, fearing that lockdowns of health systems and stay-at-home orders would increase TB transmission, decrease access to treatment and screening, and ultimately lead to a surge in incidence and mortality.

    Recent work by Kendall et al 2 published in Thorax set out to answer two questions: what was the impact of the pandemic in Uganda, and how did active TB case finding efforts help? In this well-performed study, active case finding (ACF) campaigns were conducted prior to the pandemic in 2019 and post-pandemic in 2021. The proportion of TB cases identified through this campaign dropped from 0.94% in 2019 to 0.54% in 2021. The authors concluded that community-wide active TB case finding could have a meaningful impact on TB burden at the population level, even in the wake of reduced access to diagnostic and treatment facilities and potentially increased contact to infectious individuals within families or other close-contact circles. These findings, while exciting, warrant …

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    Footnotes

    • Twitter @SteinGenEpiLab

    • Contributors CMS was the sole author of this work and as such is solely responsible for all content therein.

    • Funding This study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (75N93019C00071, RO1-AI147319, U19AI162583).

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

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