Casting light on TB: a community awareness, screening, testing, and treatment campaign

Abstract

<sec><title>BACKGROUND</title>As part of its recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Uganda National TB and Leprosy Program (NTLP) undertook a country-wide community-based active TB and leprosy case-finding intervention, the CAST-TB campaign. We aim to describe the process and results from this intervention over 2 years of implementation.</sec><sec><title>METHODS</title>The NTLP carried out preparatory activities including orientation of national and regional stakeholders, training and equipping of health facility and community teams, and setting up data collection mechanisms. The NTLP then supported health facility teams to review their TB notification data and map locations with the highest case notifications within their catchment area (TB hotspots). Active TB case-finding interventions were then carried out in each of these TB hotspots.</sec><sec><title>RESULTS</title>Three episodes of the CAST-TB campaign were carried out from March 2022 to March 2023. Overall, 6,715,810 individuals were screened for TB. Of these, 696,940 (10%) had presumptive TB, 480,522 (69%) received a TB diagnostic test, and 14,560 were diagnosed with TB (including 253 with rifampicin-resistant TB). Of 4,302 individuals with skin patches, 5% (196) were diagnosed with leprosy.</sec><sec><title>CONCLUSION</title>Targeted community-based active TB case finding can exponentially improve TB case finding and treatment initiation in high-TB-burden settings like Uganda.</sec>.