Tuberculosis in NSW, 2003-2007

Abstract

must report all cases to their local public health unit. Public health unit or chest clinic staff enter case details into the Notifiable Diseases Database (NDD), which is maintained by the Communicable Diseases Branch of the NSW Department of Health. Cases were assigned to their corresponding year of notification using a specific tuberculosis field in NDD called year of diagnosis. This field was added to NDD in 2004 to assist the assignment of cases where dates of onset, specimen collected, notification and treatment overlap years. Cases in 2003 and earlier were assigned to their corresponding year if their date of onset, date of report or date of notification fell between 1 January and 31 December of the relevant year. We analysed the characteristics of cases for the period 2003–2007 and examined trends in incidence since 1991. Incidence rates were calculated using the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimated mid-year population for the relevant year. Estimates for different resident populations by country of birth were provided by the Health Outcomes Information Statistical Toolkit (HOIST) and were calculated from a number of ABS datasets. 7