Australian funded and supported research in Vietnam has demonstrated that active community-wide screening can substantially reduce the prevalence of tuberculosis in areas with a high burden of disease.
The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, support the implementation of active screening and case finding in order to substantially accelerate progress toward the WHO goal of tuberculosis elimination.
The Active Case Finding for Tuberculosis 3 (ACT3) study compared active screening performed annually for three years in more than 42,000 participants from about 60 villages or suburbs, with no intervention in similar sized communities.
In the control communities, screening was only conducted in people presenting with symptoms to the local TB clinics.
All participants who were diagnosed with tuberculosis in either group were treated according to the national TB program policy.
The study found the prevalence ratio for microbiologically confirmed TB in the intervention group during a fourth year of the study was 0.56 in comparison to the control group.