Pilot project on mainland helps identify more patients with TB

The World Health Organisation recommends that diabetes patients be screened for TB - because diabetes triples the risk of developing TB - and that TB patients also be screened for diabetes.

However, few countries have implemented such a scheme.

With health workers around the world still trying to figure out the feasibility and affordability of such screening, a nine-month pilot project on the mainland could provide some clues.

Lin Yan, director of the China office of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, said it had been a success. "This pilot project demonstrated that it is feasible to carry out screening of diabetes patients for TB, resulting in high detection rates of TB," Lin said. "The framework was very new and this is the first known large-scale study to demonstrate it is possible to do large-scale bidirectional screening."

The mainland has the second highest number of TB cases in the world - after India - estimated at between 900,000 and 1.2 million new cases a year. It also has 92.4 million adults with diabetes and 148 million adults with prediabetes symptoms.

The pilot project, involving the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the union, the WHO and the World Diabetes Foundation, selected six hospitals for screening TB patients for diabetes and five others for screening diabetes patients for TB for about nine months from September last year.