The production and writing of this World Health Organization (WHO) document – the WHO operational handbook on tuberculosis, Module 1: Prevention – tuberculosis infection prevention and control – was coordinated by Avinash Kanchar and Dennis Falzon, under the guidance of Matteo Zignol and the overall direction of Tereza Kasaeva, Director of the WHO Global Tuberculosis Programme (WHO/ GTB). The text of the handbook builds on the recommendations and remarks of the WHO tuberculosis (TB) infection prevention and control guidelines, which were coordinated by Fuad Mirzayev and Lice González-Angulo in 2019. The initial draft of this document was developed by Giovanni Battista Migliori of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases, Tradate, Italy, and Lia D’Ambrosio of the Public Health Consulting Group, Lugano, Switzerland. We thank Lisa Chen, Paul Jensen and Kelly Musoke, in particular, for their help in sharing content from the Practical manual for preventing TB, which was developed by the Curry International Tuberculosis Center, University of California, San Francisco, United States of America (USA). We thank Anand Date and the team from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA, for sharing content from the TB BASICS toolkit, that contributed significantly to Annexes 3, 4, 5, and 9 and Box 2.4 and 2.5.
WHO acknowledges and is grateful for the time and support of all individuals who have contributed to these efforts, and gratefully acknowledges the contribution of all experts involved in the production of this operational handbook. The following also reviewed the handbook and provided comments: Paul Jensen, Matsie Mphahlele, Carrie Tudor and Grigory Volchenkov (End TB Transmission Initiative); Sevim Ahmedov and Peter Kerndt (United States Agency for International Development, USA); Anand Date, Rajesh Deshmukh, Diana Forno Rodriguez and Christine Ho (US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA); Malik Parmar, Ranjani Ramachandran and Anand Sridhar (WHO Country Office, India); Benedetta Allegranzi (WHO Integrated Health Services, Switzerland), Nizam Damani and Peter Hoffman (WHO independent consultants); Martin Van Den Boom (WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt); Aye Thida and Vineet Bhatia (WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia, India); and Saskia Den Boon and Licé González-Angulo (WHO/GTB).
We acknowledge financial support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the European Respiratory Society (ERS).