Boston, MA – Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease that
causes an estimated 2 million deaths each year. The majority of
those deaths occur in developing countries, home to more than
900 million of the world's 1.1 billion smokers. In addition,
about half of the world's people cook and heat their homes with
coal and biomass fuels such as wood, animal dung and charcoal,
which generate indoor air pollution. In a new study, researchers
from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) undertook a
systematic review and meta-analysis of epidemiologic data to
quantitatively assess the association between smoking, passive
smoking and indoor air pollution and TB. They found consistent
evidence that smoking is associated with an increased risk of
TB; they also found that passive smoking (secondhand smoke) and
the burning of biomass fuels was associated with an increased TB
risk. The study appears online on January 16, 2007, in the open-
access journal PLoS Medicine. "The evidence suggests that, when
compared to non-sm