WHO consolidated guidelines on tuberculosis. Module 2: screening – systematic screening for tuberculosis disease
Publication year: 2021
Tuberculosis (TB) is a leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, despite being largely curable and preventable. In 2019 an estimated 2.9 million of the 10 million people who fell ill with TB were not diagnosed or reported to the World Health Organization. The Political Declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2018 commits, amongst others, to diagnosing and treating 40 million people with TB by 2022. In order to achieve this ambitious target, there is an urgent need to deploy strategies to improve diagnosis and initiation of care for people with TB. One of them is systematic screening for TB disease, which is included in the End TB Strategy as a central component of its first pillar to ensure early diagnosis for all with TB. To help facilitate the implementation of TB screening at the country level, WHO published guidelines on screening for TB in 2013. Since then, there have been important new studies evaluating the impact of screening interventions on both individual-level and community-level outcomes related to TB, as well as new research evaluating innovative tools for screening for TB among important populations at high risk for TB disease.