Pulmonary Tuberculosis and Its Prevention

Every year, 10 million people fall ill with tuberculosis (TB) in the world, and of those, 1.5 million people die even though it is a preventable and curable disease. As a result, TB remains the world’s leading infectious cause of death. On the other hand, in industrialized countries, the TB incidence has fallen to a historic low, and clinicians’ experience with TB diminished significantly in recent years. Additional challenges for clinicians include atypical presentation of TB in the immunocompromised, especially among the elderly, and an increasing number of patients with drug-resistant TB. Delayed diagnosis of TB leads to the spread of TB including nosocomial transmission because TB is an air-borne infectious disease, and suboptimal treatment can result in development of drug resistance.  Furthermore, treatment of latent TB infection (LTBI) can prevent future TB cases but it has been under-utilized despite recent innovations in diagnosis and treatment regimens of LTBI. This bookfocuses on advances in diagnostic tools and treatment for both TB disease and latent TB infection. Each chapter/topic is written by one of the top TB experts in the field and the authors are from Japan and the US.