This Guideline outlines the purpose and the target audience of the second edition of Guidance for national tuberculosis programmes on the management of tuberculosis in children. It discusses the difference between TB in children and adolescents and TB in adults and provides an estimate of the burden of c...
WHO has developed guidelines on systematic screening for active tuberculosis (TB) based on a thorough review of available evidence. Early detection of TB is essential to further improve health outcomes for people with TB, and to reduce TB transmission more effectively. Systematic screening in high risk g...
The global priorities for tuberculosis (TB) care and control are to improve case-detection and to detect cases earlier, including cases of smear-negative disease which are often associated with coinfection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and young age, and to enhance the capacity to diagnose ...
WHO estimates that up to half a million new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) occur worldwide, each year. Current treatment regimens for MDR-TB present many challenges: treatment lasts 20 months or more, requiring daily administration of drugs that are more toxic, less effective, and far...
Tuberculosis (TB) contacts are people who have close contact with patients with infectious TB.
As they are at high risk for infection (and in line with the Stop TB strategy), TB contacts should
be investigated systematically and actively for TB infection and disease. Such interventions
are called ‘tube...
This 2011 update of Guidelines for the programmatic management of drug-resistant
tuberculosis is intended as a tool for use by public health professionals working in response
to the Sixty-second World Health Assembly’s resolution on prevention and control of
multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and extensi...
Commercial liquid culture systems and molecular line-probe assays have been endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as gold standards for rapid detection of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis (TB); however, because of technical complexity, cost and the requirement for sophisticated laboratory...
Earlier and improved tuberculosis (TB) case detection - including smear-negative disease, often associated with HIV co-infection - as well as expanded capacity to diagnose multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) are global priorities for TB control. Conventional laboratory methods are slow and cumberso...
Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) increasingly occur in resource-constrained settings. In the context of a national response to MDR- and XDR-TB, health workers in TB clinics (in district hospitals and some accredited health centres) will need t...
This document is intended to provide an interim policy framework for the laboratory component relevant to programmatic implementation of MDR-TB strategies....
