Testing Immigrants for TB
In a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week the authors recommend that “immigrants to the U.S. from Africa and Southeast Asia should be tested and treated for tuberculosis (TB) before they arrive, to prevent importing the disease. For example “screening immigrants and refugees from the Philippines and Vietnam would have detected almost half the average 250 TB cases brought into the U.S. each year from 2001 to 2006. The authors found that “over 50 percent of all cases of TB among foreign-born persons occurred among 20 percent of the overall foreign-born populations, especially persons born…in Southeast Asia [particularly the Philippines and Vietnam] and sub-Saharan Africa.”
[JAMA. 2008;300(4):405-412.]
