Results of tuberculosis screening in applicants for migration in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Setting: Pre-migration medical screening programmes in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Objective: To compare the rates of newly diagnosed bacteriologically confirmed tuberculosis (TB) in a cohort of migration applicants in Vietnam and Cambodia with current estimates of the TB burden in these countries.

Design: Interviews and medical screening of 5108 Vietnamese and 910 Cambodian migration applicants who applied for an Australian visa.

Results: On initial testing, the rate of bacteriologically confirmed TB among the Vietnamese cohort was 157 per 100,000 population compared to 989/100,000 among the Cambodian cohort. When cases detected during follow-up testing were included, the rate in the Vietnamese cohort was 489/100,000 compared to 1209/100,000 in the Cambodian cohort.

Conclusions: Although it has been suggested that the rate of newly diagnosed bacteriologically confirmed TB among migration applicants would underestimate the prevalence of TB in the Vietnamese and Cambodian populations, the rates found were substantially higher than current point estimates of the prevalence of TB, particularly for Vietnam. Our findings suggest that current published estimates of the tuberculosis burden in Vietnam and Cambodia may be conservative.