Individuals’ Vulnerability Based Active Surveillance for TB: Experiences from India

Community-based active TB case finding (ACF) has become an essential part of TB elimination efforts in high-burden settings. In settings such as the state of Kerala in India, which has reported an annual decline of 7.5% in the estimated TB incidence since 2015, if ACF is not well targeted, it may end up with a less-than-desired yield, the wastage of scarce resources, and the burdening of health systems. Program managers have recognized the need to optimize resources and workloads, while maximizing the yield, when implementing ACF. We developed and implemented the concept of ‘individuals’-vulnerability-based active surveillance’ as a substitute for the blanket approach for population/geography-based ACF for TB. Weighted scores, based on an estimate of relative risk, were assigned to reflect the TB vulnerabilities of individuals. Vulnerability data for 22,042,168 individuals were available to the primary healthcare team. Individuals with higher cumulative vulnerability scores were targeted for serial ACF from 2019 onwards. In 2018, when a population-based ACF was conducted, the number needed to screen to diagnose one microbiologically confirmed pulmonary TB case was 3772 and the number needed to test to obtain one microbiologically confirmed pulmonary TB case was 112. The corresponding figures in 2019 for individuals’-vulnerability-based ACF were 881 and 39, respectively. Individuals’-vulnerability-based active surveillance is proposed here as a practical solution to improve health system efficiency in settings where the population is relatively stationary, the TB disease burden is low, and the health system is strong.