Males, Ages ≥ 45 Years, Businessperson, Floating Population, and Rural Residents May Be Considered High-risk Groups for Tuberculosis Infection in Guangzhou, China: a Review of 136,394 Tb Confirmed Cases

Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease caused by the chronic and continuous infection of the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis). It is a major public health problem that has threatened the health of human beings worldwide, especially in developing countries. Although the World Health Organization (WHO) has launched the “Global Plan to Stop Tuberculosis”, which aims to save a million lives by 2015, China, the second among the 22 high-burden countries, has different incidences and prevalence of TB in different provinces. As the largest trading city in southern China, Guangzhou, located in the southern subtropical, with over 7.94 million registered inhabitants and 4.76 million floating population, here TB has become one of the extremely common airborne transmission diseases. According to the document from Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and prevention (GZCDC), a total of 19,701 cases were newly diagnosed in 2012, yielding annual incidence rate of 1545.01 per 100,000 inhabitants, public health authorities are concerned about its unacceptably high prevalence.