Epidemiological analysis of tuberculosis trends in Ethiopia: 2000-2009

Tuberculosis has been one the major causes of morbidity and mortality in Ethiopia for long. Accordingly, the Ethiopian Ministry of Health and its stakeholders have their unreserved and integrated efforts on this health problem. Among these efforts was the well developed HMIS for tuberculosis programs. However, the direction to where tuberculosis in Ethiopia is heading hasn't been well analyzed and unpackaged by epidemiologically relevant factors. The overall aim of this study was to examine the epidemiological trends of tuberculosis in Ethiopia for the ten-year period from 2000-2009. The trends were investigated from spatial, temporal, disease type and gender perspectives. A time-series study design was applied to analyze the ten-year trends of tuberculosis in Ethiopia. Data on ten-key indicators for the period of 2000-2009 was obtained from the Ministry of Health public documents. Five stratifying variables were used to analyze the trends in the key tuberculosis indicators. The data on the indicators have undergone five stages of analysis: aggregation, computation, summarization, graphics and model fitting. The incidence rate of tuberculosis is increasing in Ethiopia at a rate of 5 new tuberculosis cases per 100.000 populations per year. Urban agro-ecological zones have been more affected by the disease throughout the ten-year period. Extra-pulmonary rate and smear-negativity has shown a modest increment during the study period. Masculine gender was also disproportionately affected by tuberculosis during the ten-year study period. On the other hand case detection rate and treatment success rate are found to be increasing at a rate of 0.5% per year.