Transmission of tuberculosis in British centre for patients infected with HIV

Abstract

Patients infected with HIV are at particular risk of tuberculosis, because of both the reactivation of latent infection and the rapid development of disease after exposure to any new source of infection. Many outbreaks of tuberculosis in patients infected with HIV and in the carers of those patients have occurred in hospitals and other institutions in the United States and Europe.1, 2 Those with tuberculosis caused by multiple drug resistant strains have been associated with a high mortality. Study of the epidemiology of tuberculosis has been helped by restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis with the insertion sequence IS6110. This repetitive element is randomly inserted, usually in multiple copies, in the genomic DNA of members of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex. A standardised methodology for this technique has been proposed.3 We used this methodology to investigate a cluster …