Tuberculosis screening for international students at a Midwestern liberal arts college
Abstract
Participants: 318 international students at Macalester College screened for latent tuberculosis infection via tuberculin skin tests (TST) from 2004-2008. Objective: To estimate positive TST probability based on countries of residency and history of BCG vaccination. Methods and Results: 52% of students had a positive TST. Logistic regression modeling shows that a positive TST is insignificantly correlated with history of BCG vaccination (p=0.910) but is significantly negatively correlated with residence in the European Union (p=0.00502) and the Middle East (p=0.00451), and positively correlated with residence in North America (p=0.00151). Conclusions: There is a significant relationship between TST result and residence in three regions. The surprising positive correlation for North America is explained by examining those 52 students who resided in North America, 7 of whom had only resided in the United States in spite of being born abroad. For more useful predictive models, we recommend additional patient history data to gather.Suggested Citation
Grace Goetzke, Victor Addona, and Chad M. Topaz. 2008. "Tuberculosis screening for international students at a Midwestern liberal arts college" The Selected Works of Chad Topaz
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/chad_topaz/14