Brazil National Tuberculosis Control Programme

Brazil's national tuberculosis program, the Programa Nacional de Controle da Tuberculose, run by the Health Surveillance Secretariat of the country's Ministry of Health. Brazil ranks fifteenth among the 22 countries that the World Health Organization estimates account for 80 percent of tuberculosis cases worldwide, with an estimated 50 million people infected nationwide and roughly 111,000 new cases and 6,000 tuberculosis deaths occurring each year. The program's national control plan organizes care through three tiers of health facilities, basic care units for routine services, secondary reference units for more complex diagnostic and therapeutic cases, and tertiary units for drug-resistant tuberculosis, and it has reported expanding coverage of supervised treatment, rising cure rates, reduced treatment abandonment and declining tuberculosis incidence as principal results of the program's approach.