This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Travel to tuberculosis-endemic countries influences contraction of disease in pediatric patients

Canadian-born pediatric patients with Mycobacterium tuberculosis are more likely to develop the condition through travel to tuberculosis-endemic countries, according to research published in Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal.

“We document that distribution of [Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb)] lineages in children mirrors those for all TB patients in Ontario and is among the first to explore associations between lineage and pediatric TB phenotype,” Jonathan H. Rayment, MDCM, MSc, of the divisions of respiratory medicine and infectious diseases at The Hospital For Sick Children in Toronto, and colleagues wrote. “Our clinical and genotyping data highlight travel as an important mode of TB acquisition, especially in Canadian-born children. We also report associations between Mtb lineage, place of birth, ethnic community and extrathoracic disease.”

Rayment and colleagues identified 77 first-generation and second-generation Canadian patients with culture-positive TB between 2002 and 2012 and used Mycobacterial Interspersed Repetitive Units–Variable Number Tandem Repeat (MIRU-VNTR) to isolate Mtb cases, according to the abstract.

They found patients who were foreign-born were more likely to have an extrathoracic disease (OR = 3.0; 95% CI; 1.04-8.71). Additionally, extrathoracic disease was less frequent among patients who were infected with an Mtb strain from East Asia (OR = 0.1; 95% CI, 0.01-0.9) and more frequent among patients infected with an Indo-Oceanic version of Mtb (OR = 5.4; 95% CI, 1.5-19.2).

Foreign-born patients were also less likely to be matched in the genotype database used in the study (OR = 0.32; 95% CI, 0.11-0.90). Patients without a known TB contact were more likely to have traveled to a country where TB is endemic (OR = 13.0; 95% CI, 2.5-78.5), Rayment and colleagues noted. – by Jeff Craven

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.