ABSTRACT
Since the early 2000s, public health services and community associations in Rio de Janeiro began developing what we call a community approach to DOTS and tuberculosis care, thus answering the specific challenges of treating tuberculosis in this city and effectively reducing treatment interruption and increasing treatment completion and cure rates. However, tuberculosis incidence was still very high. We argue that the community approach to DOTS was mostly aimed at the individual-level issues of treatment whereas tuberculosis transmission and activation were importantly determined at other levels, like the collective level and the structural level, which need to be addressed.
