Link to press release: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/2018/12/nearly-1-in-5-tibetan-refugee-schoolchildren-has-tuberculosis-infection-johns-hopkins-study-finds
This is a press release about the findings of ZTB’s prevalence surveys. It was published in December 2018 by the Data Foundation, a bipartisan think tank in Washington DC, USA.
Introduction
In a tuberculosis screening and treatment initiative covering the entire population of Tibetan refugee schoolchildren in northern India, a team directed by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the University of Wisconsin says it has found not only a startlingly high prevalence of TB disease and infection, but also a potentially workable strategy to eliminate the disease in a large, high-risk group.
“Our innovative initiative includes population-level implementation of TB preventive therapy as part of a multipronged strategy to control and eliminate TB in an at-risk population in India,” says lead study author Kunchok Dorjee, Ph.D., M.B.B.S. Dorjee is a research associate at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Zero TB in Tibetan Kids project—an initiative implemented locally by the Delek Hospital in Dharamsala and the Central Tibetan Administration health and education departments. “With the support of local leadership and community mobilization, including support from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, we have demonstrated that TB control can be achieved on a population level. The findings provide a benchmark to measure and compare progress toward elimination in the future.”
