Are official reports sufficient? Official registration rates of patients with tuberculosis in Sivas, Middle Anatolia.
OBJECTIVE
The main goal of this retrospective study was to re-evaluate all available records of clinical and laboratory data of patients with tuberculosis (TB) in Sivas province, Middle Anatolia, Turkey.


METHODS
TB registration data held at health institutions in Sivas province were compared and matched with data obtained from the local official TB registries from January 2000 to December 2001.


RESULTS
Of the 536 TB cases found in 2000 and 2001, 255 (47.6%) were officially registered. Of the 127 cases with smear-positive pulmonary TB (PTB), only nine cases labelled as smear-positive were registered in local dispensaries. The incidence of unregistered cases with smear-positive PTB found by this study was approximately 40-fold and eightfold greater than the incidence of registered cases for 2000 and 2001, respectively.


CONCLUSIONS
There were many more unofficially recorded TB patients compared with officially recorded cases in Sivas province between 2000 and 2001. The results of this study are disappointing and alarming for Turkey's national TB control programme, at least for its regional applications.
Department of Chest Diseases, Cumhuriyet University Medical School, Sivas, Turkey.
S L
SL
Ozsahin
I
I
Akkurt
L
L
Ozdemir
O T
OT
Dogan
A
A
Atalan
F
F
Kocoglu
D003625:Data Collection / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D012042:Registries / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D014376:Tuberculosis / Q000453:epidemiology; D014397:Tuberculosis, Pulmonary / Q000453:epidemiology*; D014421:Turkey