Epidemiology of Tuberculosis in south-west of Iran: a brief report.

Background: Tuberculosis is still one of the main causes of mortality and disability in developing countries. Despite of socio-economic development of communities and controlling majority of communicable diseases, With respect to importance and high incidence of Tuberculosis in marginal provinces, the present study was aimed to assess the epidemiology of Tuberculosis. Methods: In this Descriptive-Analytical Retrospective Study, documents of 6363 patients diagnosed with TB in the beginning of March 2005 to the end of the September 2012 in Khuzestan province, Iran, by used census sampling size, were used. Demographic variables and other necessity data were recorded by TB-Register software and then these data were analyzed by SPSS 16.0 software and Chi-square and independent t-tests with a significance level of less than 5%. For comparison Tuberculosis incidence in consecutive years used by Poisson tests (with a significance level of less than 5%). Results: mean age of patients and median age of patients were 39.3±18 and 35±6.5 years, for women mean age was older 2.1 years than men and there was significant relationship to age (P=0.0001). Of all patients 75.7% were pulmonary tuberculosis, 2.7% were infected with HIV and 91.2% were new cases. Cumulative incidence in province was 148.84/100,000. Most prevalent in Non-pulmonary TB was Lymphatic glands. Poisson test showed that changing trends of TB incidence in study years was statistically significant (P<0.05). Conclusion: Increasing concurrent of HIV infection and TB and decreasing patients mean age (39.3±18) and median (35±6.5) in southwest of Iran has high prevalence. Screening, training and preventive activities for controlling of disease is highly recommended for the whole country and in margin provinces in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]