BALTIMORE, Aug. 2 (UPI) -- U.S. medical residents aren't proficient at diagnosing and managing tuberculosis, a study by Johns Hopkins University indicated.
Dr. Petros Karakousis, of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore, administered a 20-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 and the section on the diagnosis and treatment of latent TB -- 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 -- a patient develops TB-related symptoms --as well as those involving interpretation of diagnostic tests for patients with active TB, according to the study published online in the journal BMC Infectious Diseases.
