YSPH EMD Seminar Series: "Contact Tracing for TB and COVID-19: From There to Here and Back Again"

Before COVID-19, tuberculosis (TB) was the leading cause of death due to an infectious disease worldwide, and its control and elimination remain an urgent priority for the >10 million people who develop TB worldwide each year. While many fundamental aspects of TB, including its transmission and immunopathogenesis, remain incompletely understood, the major barrier to control of TB is a failure to implement what we already know about how to find, treat, and prevent TB. We will describe our group’s efforts in low- and middle-income countries to improve implementation of TB contact tracing, an evidence-based intervention which epitomizes the as-yet unrealized promise of integrated, patient-centered diagnosis, treatment, and prevention for TB. We will conclude by sharing how our group applied our learnings from global TB contact investigation to a collaboration with the New Haven Health Department on COVID-19 contact tracing during the second quarter of 2020.