Trend of rifampicin resistant, MDR and XDR tuberculosis in Italy, 2009–2016

What is it about?

A retrospective analysis was conducted on 15985 tuberculosis (TB) cases occurred in Italy from 2009 to 2016 in order to investigate the trend of isolation of rifampicin-resistant (RR), multidrug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains collected from 7248 Italian-born persons (IBP) and 8737 foreign-born persons (FBP) arrived from 107 countries. Overall, RR and MDR rates of FBP were higher than IBP and decreased in parallel with those of FBP+IBP. The MDR rates decreased with a mean annual change of -3.8% for FBP+IBP and stabilized at low level for IBP. Overall, in Italy the RR and MDR TB rates of FBP were higher than IBP but showed an overall decrease from 2009 to 2016.

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