The results of an initiative to reduce tuberculosis in China—supported by the World Bank and WHO—are reported in this week’s issue of THE LANCET.
Disease prevalence has been reduced by around 30% in areas where a treatment programme was introduced a decade ago; authors of the study comment that expansion of the programme to all areas of China will further improve national and global tuberculosis control.
China has 1.4 million new cases of tuberculosis every year—more than any country except India. A tuberculosis control project based on short-course chemotherapy using anti-tuberculosis drugs within the internationally recommended DOTS strategy was introduced in half the country in 1991, after a national survey of tuberculosis prevalence in 1990. Another survey was done in 2000 to re-evaluate the national tuberculosis burden, providing the opportunity to assess the effect of the control project.
More than a third of a million people were surveyed in the year 2000 at 257 investigation points chosen from all 31 mainland provinces in China. The survey showed a decrease in tuberculosis prevalence of around a third compared with the original survey done in 1990.