The Prevalence of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis among People Living with HIV (PLHIV) in Abia State

Tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic disease caused by mycobacterium tuberculosis and transmitted？from person to person, through inhalation of droplet nuclei aerosolized by coughing of an infected？person. It reached epidemic proportions in Europe and North America during the 18th and 19th？centuries. The incubation period is 2 - 6 weeks and the control has been complicated with emergence of HIV and drug-resistant TB. In 1993, World Health Organization (WHO) declared TB a？global emergency. However, despite the concerted effort of National TB control programs, adoption and implementation of Stop TB strategy, TB has remained a major public health challenge？with high mortality rate, especially in developing countries. Methodology: This is a descriptive？study, evaluated using the positivist/quantitative approach. The study was conducted at FederalMedical Centre Umuahia, a tertiary specialist hospital with comprehensive TB/HIV treatment services. All the presumptive drug-resistant TB cases and symptomatic PLHIV were screened for HIV？and their sputum specimens were tested for tuberculosis using the Gene xpert and the Ziehl-？Neelsen technique for detecting Acid Fast bacilli. A pretested structured questionnaire was used tocollect the demographic data and other essential data from the presumptive TB and laboratory？registers such as total number of TB presumptive cases registered HIV status, AFB status and rifampicin status within the study period. Result: A total of 493 presumptive TB cases were？screened？in the study, 49.9% were HIV positive while 50.05% were HIV negative. More so, 77.85% of thescreened cases were AFB negative and 22.15% were AFB positive. Moreover, 11% of the TB/HIV？co-infected patients were rifampicin positive. Interestingly among the 493 cases screened with？gene xpert machine, 3.6% were rifampicin positive. Furthermore, 3.6% of the HIV negative cases were rifampicin positive while 1.6% of the HIV positive cases were rifampicin positive. Discussion: The data depict lower rifampicin resistance among HIV positive cases than HIV negative cases. The implication for public health professionals is to intensify equitable and unbiased search for resistant TB cases among smear negative and positive cases.