Ethical challenges in community-based tuberculosis screening and surveillance

The community-based screening and surveillance of tuberculosis have become extensive and crucial aspects of the global methods of eliminating this disease, but their ethical aspects have not been well-defined. This paper has methodically appraised the ethical issues that have been experienced in community based TB screening and surveillance programs using a mixed methods design involving quantitative measure of ethical occurrences and qualitative measurement of the stakeholder views. There was a cross-sectional study on 18 community TB screening programs that involved 2847 screened people, 156 healthcare workers, and 42 program administrators in 18 months. Primary outcomes were frequency and typology of ethical challenges, stakeholder perception of ethical adequacy and relationships between program characteristics and rate of ethical incidents. Ethical incidents were defined as events involving potential or actual compromise of autonomy, privacy, fairness, or dignity, as documented through standardized reporting mechanisms. The findings showed that 847 ethical cases were reported in programs (29.7 per 100 screenings), and privacy and confidentiality issues were the most common type (34.2%), and then inadequately informed consent (24.8) and stigmatization events (19.6). Digital surveillance technology-based programs were reported to have considerably more incidents on privacy-related issues (42.3% vs. 26.4, p = 0.001). Ethical adequacy in stakeholder scores of 5-point scale had a mean score of 3.21 ± 0.87, with lower scores reported by community members (2.89 ± 0.94) than by healthcare workers (3.54 ± 0.72, p < 0.001). The results indicate that the ethical issues raised by the community-based TB screening programs are very important and need an organized approach to address, where the program design, implementation of technology, and policymaking in a situation of infectious disease surveillance are also implicated.