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Although contact investigation to identify and evaluate individuals recently exposed to a person with infectious tuberculosis (TB) is a core strategy for TB control, few data are available to document its long-term effect on TB prevention. Now, researchers have conducted a retrospective cohort study to assess the benefit of this approach.
Using the New York City TB registry, the investigators identified 5182 patients with infectious TB diagnosed between 1997 and 2003 and 30,561 contacts of these patients. Active TB was diagnosed within 4 years of exposure in 378 (1%) of the contacts, including 268 (71%) in whom diagnosis occurred within 9 months of exposure. Among the 103 contacts who developed active disease and had genotyping results avail…