Abstract

It is estimated that one third of the world's population is infected with tuberculosis. Though once thought a "dead" disease, tuberculosis is very much alive. The rise of drug resistant strains of tuberculosis, and TB-HIV coinfection have made tuberculosis an even greater worldwide threat. While HIV, poverty, and public health infrastructure are historically assumed to affect the burden of tuberculosis, recent research has been done to implicate smoking in this list. This analysis involves combining data from multiple sources in order determine if smoking is a statistically significant factor in predicting the number of incident tuberculosis cases in a country. Quasi-Poisson generalized linear models and negative binomial regression will be used to analyze the effect of smoking, as well as the other factors, on tuberculosis incidence. This work will enhance tuberculosis control efforts by helping to identify new hypotheses that can be tested in future studies. One of the main hypotheses is whether or not smoking increases the number of tuberculosis cases above and beyond the effects of other factors that are known to influence tuberculosis incidence. These known factors include TB-HIV coinfection, poverty and public health infrastructure represented by treatment outcomes.

Degree

MS

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Statistics

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2012-03-06

Document Type

Selected Project

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd5019

Keywords

smoking, tuberculosis, Poisson regression, negative binomial regression

Language

English

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