[Asthma concepts and epidemiological tools for prevalence researches]. / Conceitos de asma e instrumentos de levantamentos epidemiológicos de prevalência.

INTRODUCTION: Asthma, as a multifatorial disease, with high prevalence and frequent recurrence, attack people, independently of age, sex and geographical area. Because of lack of consensus about the definition of asthma, many questionnaires have been developed to standardize epidemiological criteria of suspicion and diagnosis. Among them, the European Community Respiratory Health Survey (ECRHS) is an important tool for prevalence studies on adults aged from 20 to 44 years old, that represented a methodological improvement of epidemiological surveys, turning them comparable about time and place. The objectives of this article are to comment the evolution of asthma concepts and its repercussion on epidemiological surveys, as well as to chronicle the tools used on these surveys, emphasizing the importance of ECRHS and presenting epidemiological data of asthma on 351 universitary hospital servers at Recife City -- Pernambuco -- Brazil.

[Can the Mantoux test be used in BCG vaccinated children?]. / Pode-se utilizar o teste de Mantoux em crianças vacinadas com BCG?

This prospective trial was realized in 371 children previously vaccinated with BCG in the first month of life in whom the Mantoux tuberculin test was done and read 48-72 hours afterwards. Among 371 BCG-vaccinated children, 106 (28.57%) were Mantoux reactive, 10 of whom with clinical tuberculosis. There was no statistically significant difference in the tuberculin test between the control group (59 non-BCG-vaccinated children) and 180 vaccinated children, considering those under 6 years old. When we compared by age, we verified that just 36.36% of the children at the age 2 reacted positively to PPD.