Publication Date:
01 Mar 2019
Citation:
Nguenha D, Garcia JI, Cowan JF, Garcia-Basteiro AL. (2019). Spatial epidemiology for tuberculosis surveillance: a relevant add-on to routine surveillance. Int J Tuberc Lung Dis. 23(3), 278-9. doi: 10.5588/ijtld.19.0104
Excerpt
“For National TB Programs to realize this benefit at scale, they should consider routinely collecting and analyzing spatial variables for patients screened, tested and treated for TB so that this information can be woven into real-time TB surveillance platforms. These data are increasingly easy to capture with handheld devices used by community health care workers (CHWs) doing household contact tracing, including the accurate collection of data about patients addresses and migration patterns. Although this type of spatial analysis is not new,2,3 it is not frequent in low-income, high-burden settings.”