Low Prevalence of Tuberculin Skin Test Boosting among Community Residents in Uganda.

Abstract

Boosted tuberculin skin test (TST) reactions can be misclassified as new latent tuberculosis (TB) infection. To our knowledge, no study has evaluated the prevalence of TST boosting in a population-based sample in high TB burden settings. We determined the prevalence of TST boosting among urban residents in Uganda. We evaluated 99 participants with initial TST < 5 mm and repeated a skin test after 2 weeks. We found that only 2% had boosted TST reactions suggesting that most TST conversions could represent new TB infections in this high-burden setting.