Modeling the incidence of tuberculosis in southern Thailand.

The aim of this study was to examine the trend, seasonal and geographic effects on tuberculosis (TB) incidence in the fourteen southern provinces of Thailand from 1999 to 2004. Data were obtained from the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance Report (506), Ministry of Public Health. The joint effects of gender, age, quarterly season and location on the TB incidence rates were modeled using both negative binomial distribution for the number of cases and log-linear distribution for the incidence rate; then these models were compared.