ABSTRACT
Tuberculosis (TB) control may be defined as a combination of interventions that interfere in the natural relationship between human beings and tubercle bacilli in order to reverse a situation of increasing or stable epidemiologic indicators or to accelerate a declining trend. In any setting, the goal or general purpose of the TB control program is an improvement of the community health through a reduction of the infection, morbidity, andmortality fromTB and the prevention of mycobacterial drug resistance. The TB problem can be considered controlled when the epidemiologic indicators come down to a level at which TB is no longer a public health problem for the country as a whole, although some subsets of the population may retain high transmission and disease rates (1,2). An objective is a quantified goal set within a time period. An incidence rate of less than 10 cases per 100,000 population might be taken as the epidemiologic objective to be reached by any country in order to consider that the TB problem is controlled. This is the criterion used by World Health Organization (WHO) to categorize the most advanced countries by progress in the implementation of TB control interventions (3).
