Despite being easy to treat in most cases, tuberculosis is still a problem in the United States and around the world. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University looked at 2000 government data to learn about TB patients.

What the researchers wanted to know: Who gets tuberculosis?

What they did: They used the 2000 Nationwide Inpatient Sample, part of the federal government's Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. This data set has information from nearly 1,000 hospitals in 28 states; it covers nearly 7.5 million hospitalizations.

What they found: Most of the patients admitted to the hospital with tuberculosis are men, and most are not white. Half live in low-income neighborhoods, and two thirds have either no health insurance or publicly funded health insurance. Compared with patients admitted to hospitals for other reasons, patients admitted for TB stayed longer, and their care cost more. The authors estimate there were over 11,000 hospital admissions for TB in the United States in 2000. (They can't say from this how many people were hospitalized, since one person can be admitted multiple times, but 16,377 TB cases were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2000.) Five percent of people admitted to the hospital with tuberculosis died in the hospital, which is higher than death rates for inpatients with other illnesses.

What the study means to you: Tuberculosis is supposed to be easy to cure, but this shows it's still a major problem. The researchers say doctors need better ways to handle people at high risk of dying from the disease.

Caveats: The researchers omitted people whose primary reason for hospitalization was put down as HIV, even if they also had TB, so they may not have been getting the whole story. But when they reanalyzed some of the data with those people included, they saw similar trends.

Find out more: Information on the Nationwide Inpatient Sample

Read the article: Hansel, N.N. et al. "Hospitalizations for Tuberculosis in the United States in 2000: Predictors of In-Hospital Mortality." Chest. October 2004, Vol. 126, No. 4, pp. 1079–1086.

Abstract online: www.chestjournal.org