US medical residents are not proficient at diagnosing and
managing tuberculosis (TB), according to a report published in
the online open access journal, BMC Infectious Diseases. Dr.
Petros Karakousis et al. from the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine, US, administered a twenty-question survey
about TB to 131 medical residents attending a single teaching
conference at each of their respective institutions in 2005. The
residents came from four different urban medical centers in
Baltimore and Philadelphia, which both have a moderate
prevalence of TB. Just under half of the questions were answered
incorrectly. The section on the diagnosis and treatment of
latent TB (where a patient is infected with TB but has no
symptoms) was particularly poorly answered, with residents
getting on average three-fifths of the answers wrong. The
residents also had particular difficulty in answering questions
pertaining to the risk of progression from latent TB to active
disease (where a patient develops TB-related symptoms