Abstract
Tubercle bacilli infection is a considerable medical and public health problems in Ethiopia. The disease burden is exacerbated if tuberculosis infected individuals are co-infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). The aim of this study was to determine the magnitude of pulmonary tuberculosis-human immunodeficiency virus co-infections among clinically suspected tuberculosis patients who examined sputum at the Minjar Health Center. Institution based retrospective data were collected in April, 2014 from those patients who had sputum examination from October 2012 to September 2013. Descriptive statistics were computed to get summary values for most variables. Chi-square was calculated to see the association between tuberculosis-human immunodeficiency virus co-infections with socio-demographic variables. A total of 329 participants (54.7 males and 45.3% females) were included in the study. The overall prevalence of tuberculosis and human immunodeficiency virus infections from the total cases was 9.4 and 2.7%, respectively. The prevalence of tuberculosis-human immunodeficiency virus co-infection among tuberculosis infected cases was 29%. Patients in the age range >18 years had higher distribution rate of 7/28 (25%) tuberculosis-human immunodeficiency virus co-infections. The prevalence of pulmonary tuberculosis infection and co-infection with human immunodeficiency virus was higher in males than females. The prevalence of pulmonary tuberculosis-human immunodeficiency virus co-infections is high among clinically suspected cases. Hence, this high prevalence calls for routine screening of tuberculosis patients for human immunodeficiency virus to minimize the disease burden of tuberculosis and human immunodeficiency virus co-infections. Key words: Tuberculosis, HIV, Minjar Health Center, TB-HIV co-infection.
Highlights
Tuberculosis (TB) is considered as a disease of the past in many developed countries
Of the 9.27 million incident cases of TB in 2007, an estimated 456,000 deaths among incident TB cases who were human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) positive, 1.37 million (14%) were HIV positive; 79% of these HIVpositive cases were in the African region and 11% were in the Southeast Asia region (WHO, 2009)
All pulmonary tuberculosis suspected cases who visited the outpatient outpatient departments (OPD) of Minjar Health Center were included in this study
Summary
Tuberculosis (TB) is considered as a disease of the past in many developed countries. The impact of this disease can be devastating even today, especially in those resource poor countries like Africa suffering from. TB-HIV co-epidemics remain a major public health challenge, in resource-limited settings. 79% of the cases were in the African Region (WHO, 2012). Tuberculosis can occur at all points in the immunosuppressive spectrum of HIV disease, with variable presentations in high-burden countries (Parsons et al, 2011). Ethiopia, where economic imbalances are extreme and basic health service delivery is insufficient, determining the prevalence of TB-HIV co-infections among clinically suspected patients is ideal to minimize the diseases burden. Little work has been done on the burden of TB-HIV co-infected cases. The aim of this study was to determine the magnitude of TB-HIV co-infections among clinically suspected cases at Minjar.
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