Use of Lot Quality Assurance Sampling to Ascertain Levels of Drug Resistant Tuberculosis in Western Kenya.

Objective: To classify the prevalence of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in two different geographic settings in western Kenya using the Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS) methodology.

Design: The prevalence of drug resistance was classified among treatment-naïve smear positive TB patients in two settings, one rural and one urban. These regions were classified as having high or low prevalence of MDR-TB according to a static, two-way LQAS sampling plan selected to classify high resistance regions at greater than 5% resistance and low resistance regions at less than 1% resistance.