importance of contact history in childhood tuberculosis

ABSTRACT

Tuberculosis is an ancient disease that is known to have existed in the prehistoric times, and has been a major health burden, even today 95% of the cases are present in the developing countries. The exact proportion of children with tuberculosis is unknown but it is estimated to be between 3-13% of all cases [Ejaz and Mumtaz, 2002]. The child with TB in a community will represent a failure of TB control in that community. Patients included in the study were children age between 1-15 years of either sex coming to a tertiary hospital with history, clinical and laboratory findings of tuberculosis. Diagnosis of tuberculosis was made on the basis of WHO criteria, with the support of MT, chest X-ray, clinical history and history of contact with patients of pulmonary tuberculosis. There were total 160 patients include in our study, 109 [68.1%] patients had positive history of contact from home, close relatives and from neighbors while in 51[30%] cases there was no history of contact detected