Improving tuberculosis contact tracing: the role of evaluations in the home and workplace

Abstract

The newly implemented contact screening programme, featuring home and workplace evaluation of TB patient contacts, improved adherence to screening procedures, identified more at-risk contacts and should prevent more TB cases in the future.

Management of Drug-Resistant TB

“…Close contacts are those people sharing common habitation rooms with the source case. This can also include individuals with evidence of prolonged and frequent exposure to a source case in the workplace, school, prison, hospital ward, or social settings [77]. Contact tracing is defined as the systematic finding of contacts of patients with infectious TB disease [77].…”

New opportunities in tuberculosis control: Figure 1–

“…In 2008, all identified contacts accepted screening, and the three individuals infected accepted and completed preventive therapy. Evaluation of a 2-yr period with this strategy showed an improvement of compliance to screening and preventive treatment [4].…”

“…These difficulties may help to explain several outbreaks in which the initial patient interview failed to identify at-risk contacts [8,9]. Visits to homes and workplaces improve the probability of finding unsuspected epidemiological links between patients [4].…”

“…In 2004, we decided to include a routine evaluation of every patient's home and work environment with the co-operation of public health teams [4].…”

Assessing the utility of contact tracing in reducing the magnitude of tuberculosis

“…In order to address these limitations, multiple strategies such as conducting home and workplace visits instead of interview ((viz. useful in improving adherence to screening procedures and identification of more number of at-risk contacts) (9); adoption of mobile health applications to promote digitalization and easy retrieval of data (7); and employment of different technologies (viz. interferon gamma release assays and tuberculin skin test in adults and children aged under-5) to facilitate the overall process of contact tracing (10) have been implemented in different settings.…”