German physician and microbiologist Dr. Robert Koch(b.1843 – d.1910) announced on the 24th March of 1882, that he had discovered the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, which opened the way towards diagnosing and curing this disease.

To commemorate this day in history, World Tuberculosis(TB) Day is observed as a Global Health Day of the World Health Organization(WHO) on 24 March, annually.

This World TB Day global event is to raise public awareness about the devastating health, social and economic consequences of tuberculosis, and to step up efforts to end the global tuberculosis epidemic.

The following DIY poster highlights this event.

To help step up efforts to end the global tuberculosis epidemic, a national health information system(NHIS) should be used to integrate TB data and ensure the data generated by the NHIS are reliable and complete and arrive rapidly enough to be used for a national tuberculosis program (NTP).

A good notification system is thus one of the key elements for the success of a national communicable disease prevention and control program, like the NTP.

The NTP as a national public health surveillance system receives TB notification that uses electronic medical record (EMR) / paper-based medical record data to provide situational awareness for TB-related events.

Although the public health surveillance system leverages the International Classification of Diseases(ICD) from abstracted information about medically coded TB inpatient medical records, ICD codes are not primarily used for public health surveillance purposes.

However, ICD codes provide one way to measure uptake in populations at increased risk of TB, and help provide public-use data files for public analysis, and the NTP to conduct their surveillance of TB through case findings lists to identify cases of reportable TB.