Tuberculosis in Health Care Workers: Risk Factors and Prevention

TB in Healthcare workers
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Tuberculosis in health care workers
There are two types TB infections; the latent TB which is asymptomatic, and, the active
TB which presents a number of signs and symptoms (Cowan et al., 2012). The most common
signs and symptoms of TB are fever, night sweats, coughing, production of phlegm, and loss of
weight. Since the development of HIV/AIDS in sub Saharan Africa, there has been a sharp
increase in the cases of TB. This is so especially for the southern African nations leading to a TB
pandemic. In 2011, the world incidence rates of TB by the WHO was about 125/100,000,
whereby the incidence rate in Africa was 262, 100000 of the general population. Moreover, the
incidence rates of TB in South Africa was estimated to be 993/100,000 people (Rossouw et
al., 2012). In fact, out of the 8.7 million cases of active TB, in the year 2011, South Africa
recorded about 0.5 million TB cases. There are a number of risk factors that are linked to the
development of TB. These factors can fall into various classes such as personal and
environmental risks (Floyd et al., 2012). Personal risk factors include malnutrition, smoking
habits, diabetes, cancer and genetic predisposition among many more. The environmental factors
include poor ventilation, getting into contact with contaminated sputum, and high levels of
airborne bacteria (Mokhtar & Rahman, 2017).
It is commonly argued that there are some communities which are highly vulnerable to
contacting TB such as the HIV infected people as well as health care workers(Bassett et al.,
2016). In South Africa, these risk factors are also common, thus increasing the chances of
acquiring these infections. For instance, the exposure factors to TB in South Africa is attributed
to several risk factors. The exposure of health care workers to TB is due to the high prevalence
of this disease condition among the people that they serve as well as the level of contact
(McCarthy et al., 2015). The distribution of the risk factors to TB infection is differential in

nature in places of work and depends of factors such as age, gender, the number of contact times
with the patients and the health care departments which these health care workers work in.
therefore, it is important to have a clear understanding of the risk factors that cause TB infections
in health care workers in South Africa in order to effectively control this problem (Tudor et al.,
2014). The workplace acquired TB has thus been described as a significant occupational
healthcare problem in South Africa. A review was carried out in order to determine the level of
acquired TB among health care workers. This review involved performing electronic database
searches such as EMBASE, Web of Science and MEDLINE among others. The results indicated
that out of the sixteen studies that were included in the review, ten of them reported that there
was active TB among the health care workers (Grobler et al., 2016). This study also reported the
presence of active TB including the drug resistant form among the South African population.
The authors also recommend the need for regular screening of TB among health care workers in
South Africa to prevent cross infections.
Biological hazards
Tuberculosis is a disease which has been posing major health problems for quite a
number of year. It causes a great economic burden because there are no vaccines available yet
there are some causative agents which are resistant to drugs. This condition is caused by the
members of the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (Delogu et al., 2013). These
bacterium have spread through the environment throughout the globe leading to TB pandemics.
The Mycobacterium tuberculosis has a doubling time of between 12 to 24 hours and contains a
very complex cell wall structure which is impermeable to toxic drugs and thus quite fundamental
to its virulence. The pathogenesis of TB develops once some tubercles are dispersed into the air
by an active TB infected patients (Samanovic & Darwin, 2016). These tubercles, once inhaled