journal.pone IMPROVING COMMUNITY BASED TUBERCULOSISCARE IN SOUTHERN ETHIOPIA

Summary Improving community based tuberculosis care in southern Ethiopia Ethiopia ranks 7th among high tuberculosis burden countries in the world. After implementing DOTS for more than ten years, the case detection rate of smear positive cases is only 36 %, far below global target. Therefore, tuberculosis control programme should find alternative ways to complement its activities. The general objective of the study is to improve interventions to carry out community-based tuberculosis care in southern Ethiopia. The specific objectives are: 1. To evaluate the diagnostic value and applicability of community based TB screening tool, 2. To estimate the treatment outcome of TB patients supervised by community health workers 3. To find out the costs per tuberculosis patient treated successfully 4. To find out the acceptability of community-based directly observed short course therapy 5. To find out the proportion of tuberculosis patients infected human immunodeficiency virus This is a randomized controlled community trial to estimate the treatment outcome of tuberculosis patients treated by community based directly observed short course therapy. The investigator will select matched clusters and randomly allocate to intervention and non-intervention clusters. Tuberculosis patients in the intervention clusters will start supervised short course therapy in their community. The cost per patient treated will be determined with the intervention. In addition, crosssectional studies will be conducted to find out the acceptability, TB HIV co-infection and evaluate of diagnostic tool for community-based tuberculosis care. The investigator will get ethical clearance from University of