The above article has been republished in a variety of outlets including EurekAlert! by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, MedicalXpress, BrightSurf, and Mirage News, among others.
Introduction
A recently released prospective analysis of the first eight years of the Johns Hopkins Medicine-led Zero TB in Kids program shows that significant reduction of tuberculosis (TB) transmission and burden (the total impact of health problems — specifically death, morbidity and disability — on a population) among schoolchildren in high-burden areas can be achieved using existing TB screening, treatment and follow-up protocols.
The study — partially funded by the federal government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — appears in the March 2026 issue of The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia.
Since 2017, Zero TB in Kids, a comprehensive TB screening and tuberculosis preventive treatment (TPT) program, has been implemented in settings in northern India — such as schools, monasteries and nunneries — where Tibetan refugee schoolchildren congregate.
“To evaluate the effectiveness of the first eight years of our effort, we searched for studies published between January 2000 and December 2025 to compare the results of other TB screening and treatment programs with Zero TB in Kids,” says Kunchok Dorjee, M.D., Ph.D., project director and principal investigator of Zero TB in Kids and assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “To our surprise, we could not identify any study published in that period that demonstrated meaningful reduction of TB on a population level, indicating that there are significant gaps in promoting the knowledge and experience needed to make large-scale TB screening and TPT programs work.”
