Epidemiology of tuberculosis in Arak, Iran

Introduction: Tuberculosis is an old disease that today becomes a re-emerging disease. AIDS, immigration and drug resistance have caused the change of the epidemiology of tuberculosis during the recent years. The aim of this study was to examine epidemiology of tuberculosis (TB) in Arak (Iran) during 1998-2008. Materials and Methods: This is a descriptive study based on the recorded epidemiologic information of TB patients in the health centers of Arak city during 10 recent years. At the first a questionnaire was completed for each TB patient based on his/her epidemiologic information recorded by the experts of Arak health centers. Results: Total number of TB patients in Arak city between the years 1998 and 2008 was 789 persons. The most frequent number of patients was in the year 1999 and the least was in 2007. Among them, there were 301 men and 488 women. The mean of patient’s age was 52.91. 1% had jail experience and 0.4% also suffered from AIDS, 68.1% suffered from pulmonary TB and 31.6% suffered from intrapulmonary TB. The outcome of treatment is as following: 86.2%were cured. There was 18.4% death due to TB and 1.4% death due to other reasons. Also, there were 1.4% transferred, 0.5% interrupted treatment and 15% failure treatment. Conclusion: Although it seems that the incidence of disease has decreased, but this decrement is not significantly different. AIDS has no significant effect on the epidemiology of tuberculosis in recent ten years. According to our findings, declining the successful treatment and raising the rate of death due to TB shows the necessity of better patient finding, early diagnosis and perfect cure