Tuberculosis in American Colleges and Universities

Abstract

Tuberculosis is still one of the important health problems of the college student and is so recognized by more and more colleges and universities. The number of institutions of higher education with tuberculosis case-finding programs has increased from 6 to over 300 in the past 13 years. This increasing interest in the control of tuberculosis in college students is due in large part to the coperative efforts of the Tuberculosis Committee of the American Student Health Association and the National Tuberculosis Association. The incidence of tuberculous infection in college students as shown by the tuberculin reaction has decreased from 35 per cent to approximately 20 per cent since 1931. The highest percentage of reactors was found in schools on the east and west coasts. As a result of routine case-finding programs in the colleges, between 500 and 900 new cases of tuberculosis have been diagnosed annually during the past three years. In institutions with no organized tuberculosis programs in 1942–43 only 2.21 new cases per 100,000 students were found, compared to 128.3 in those schools making an organized effort to find tuberculosis. The experience of the colleges in tuberculosis control provides further evidence that tuberculosis can be controlled in institutions by the application of known methods of diagnosis.