Tuberculosis Characteristics and Outcomes

We used universal sampling and extracted all cases that fulfilled our study criteria from the MyTB database. Information that was readily available from MyTB database was the age at diagnosis, ethnicity, nationality, gender, education level, smoking status at diagnosis, diabetes and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) status at diagnosis, sputum AFB load at diagnosis, chest X-ray (CXR) severity at diagnosis, presence of MDR-TB and status of sputum conversion at the end of the two-month intensive phase. Some information that was not available from the MyTB database such as presence of other co-morbidities, alcohol dependence status at diagnosis, duration of symptoms before diagnosis and number of days missing directly observed therapy (DOT) were obtained from the patients’ manual medical records that were kept in the respective health clinics. All data were recorded using data collection form.