Consolidated Guidelines

It is now recognized that loss of health workers due to HIV and TB requires urgent attention (Ncayiyana 2004, Menzies 2007). Hitting hardest in countries that are already severely affected by the global health human resource crisis, this situation is negatively affecting the goal of universal access to HIV services (Schneider 2006). It has been identified that together HIV and TB account for an extremely high proportion of the mortality and morbidity experienced by health workers in high burden countries (Harries 2002, Tawfik 2003).

The population of interest in these guidelines is children and adolescents, defined as:

The recommendations and the text of the WHO consolidated guidelines on tuberculosis. Module 1: Prevention – tuberculosis preventive treatment, second edition are the result of collaboration among professionals in various specialties with extensive expertise and experience in public health policy, tuberculosis (TB) programme management and the clinical care of TB patients. The recommendations in these guidelines were developed by successive guideline development groups (GDGs) convened by WHO, the latest of which met in December 2023.

Tuberculosis infection (TBI) is defined as a state of persistent immune response to stimulation by M. tuberculosis antigens with no evidence of clinically manifest TB disease. It is estimated that about one fourth of the world’s population has been infected with TB. TB preventive treatment (TPT) is one of the key interventions recommended by WHO to achieve the End TB Strategy targets, as upheld by the United Nations High-level Meeting on TB in September 2023.