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In 2001, China issued a new national tuberculosis (TB) control program that expanded the directly observed treatment, short-course (DOTS) program covering half the country's population, implemented in the 1990s, to include the entire population by 2005. In a longitudinal analysis, investigators from the Chinese CDC compared results from national TB prevalence surveys done in 1990, 2000, and 2010.
For the 2010 survey, the researchers used stratified random sampling to choose >250,000 local residents aged ≥15 years from all mainland provinces for screening that included chest radiographs and additional testing (sputum smear, culture) based on clinical findings.
The prevalence of smear-positive TB was 59 per 100,000 in 2010, down from 170 per 10…