An Assessment of the Contact History of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis Patients from Sindh: A Gender based comparison

The purpose of this project was to evaluate the pattern of transmission in patients suffering from Multidrug resistant (MDR) Tuberculosis by assessing their contact information. Data were obtained and analyzed from 164 individuals suffering from MDR TB. Records were scanned to evaluate the presence of a close contact with known history of Tuberculosis. Tabulations and analysis were performed in Microsoft Excel (R) and online calculators. Analysis of contact data showed that only 36% of the patients had a close contact with a known Tuberculosis patient. Chi-square test did not show any association between history of presence of a contact and the patients' gender (p>0.5). Among the cases with established exposure with a TB patient among close contacts, 17.5% females and 12.5% males reported exposure with a contact outside the close family. Majority of patients were unaware of the presence of a known contact in their vicinity. There was no association between knowledge about exposure and patients' gender. The study shows that efforts of active case finding should be employed to find the hidden cases of Tuberculosis in the society to stop the spread by those patients, who are unaware of their disease.